XIF Blockchain Protocol
Undoubtedly, blockchain technology has major potential. A concept significant enough to raise billions in ICOs and drive unimaginable coin prices throughout 2017. Although blockchain possess features of game changing technology, there are several technical factors that make this blockchain impractical for society to adopt so abruptly. In reality it takes many years before trust-less systems are ready for mainstream use at scale.
One major technical barrier is limited scalability. In blockchain “tradition”, all the public blockchain consensus protocols have challenging limitations — all nodes in the network must process every transaction. Although this may not seem like such bad thing, the number of nodes increase along with number of transactions. Therefore, transactional duration increases, which is illustrated in bitcoin’s inefficiencies, culprit to transactions taking up 20 minutes and having a very limited number of transactions (3.3–7 transactions per second). If you were to pay for groceries in a supermarket with Bitcoin, you would hold up a line.
A Solution
Sharding is a process at which a network can increase computational power and efficiency. It is basically dividing a network into teams. Currently, Ethereum has thousands of computers all holding the same public ledger and all doing the same functions as well, Ethereum virtual machine. The virtual machine runs on every single computer. Additional computers to a network would not improve efficiency. The reason why is because the same ledger is kept on every single computer. Why have the same ledger on every single computer? It is wasteful storage, thus unnecessary.
Sharding is a way of splitting networks into teams. Being fragmented into teams allow for smaller groups of nodes to process transactions and calculations, which drastically increase the output or efficiency of the network. For instance, if you split into 2 teams, its twice as many transactions and if you split it up into another 10 teams, there would be 10 times as many transactions.
The Risk of Sharding
This technique is no stranger to technology as it is used in video games that allows multiple simultaneous players gaming, trading and doing different things on a single network. Therefore, Sharding is very well established. The problem with this technique is that Sharding works for centralized servers very well. The challenge here is bringing the technique into a decentralized network. How do you make sure that the teams talk with each other? That is the most dangerous part of Sharding. If the Sharders don’t communicate well with each other, then there is a chance that someone could exploit that communicational gap and create extra native currencies on the network.
X Infinity Blockchain Protocol
X Infinity has modified the concept of blockchain and implemented a system that would achieve a transaction speed of 1 second and an exponential increase in transaction capacity per second.
We have made vast improvements to the technology of the standard Bitcoin protocol by building an algorithm that is called “Balanced Sharding”, whereby data is distributed across a data tree in a balanced fashion, and then separated into large data trunks to allow for fast data retrieval; at the same time, data is overlapped to ensure reliability and resilience.
The protocol is a fork of the bitcoin protocol with heavy modifications to achieve substantially higher speed and reliability. The cryptography adopted is an elliptic curve algorithm, where finding a base point in a discrete logarithm curve is infeasible. Each new node is approved by the network and the network ensures high performance of each node, therefore the system is of a semi-centralized nature which compliments the Sharding technique. Find out more about X Infinity on the official website http://www.xinfinity.io.
