Introducing bloXroute: A Scalable, Trustless Blockchain Distribution Network

Scalability is a major bottleneck to the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies. Today, we’re excited to introduce a new approach to scaling blockchains 1,000–10,000x on-chain with no protocol changes: bloXroute: A Scalable, Trustless Blockchain Distribution Network

There are many efforts to address the scalability challenges of blockchains. The Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Zcash and [insert your favorite blockchain here] communities all have their own ideas on how to scale the transactional capacity of decentralized peer-to-peer networks. Some proposals require protocol changes and miner approval. Other proposals require significant compromises on centralization or security to be made. We are proposing an alternative that allows existing blockchains to scale without protocol changes or compromises on centralization or security.

Twenty years ago when the Internet was still in its infancy, Akamai came along to create the first Content Distribution Network (CDN). This technology breakthrough helped data propagate more quickly across the Internet, making the Internet more usable in the process.

bloXroute is the first Blockchain Distribution Network (BDN)

Inspired from preceding Bitcoin Relay Networks like Falcon (which was designed by our team out of Cornell’s IC3 initiative) and Fibre, bloXroute propagates blocks more quickly across existing peer-to-peer networks, which increases throughput on-chain. We’ve improved upon the early Bitcoin Relay Networks by creating a Blockchain Distribution Network (BDN) that is provably neutral (nodes or blocks cannot be censored) and has a sustainable business model that enables a powerful public utility from which all blockchains can benefit.

We’ve designed bloXroute with the following principles in mind:

• General purpose implementation. Your favorite blockchain can implement bloXroute and significantly increase on-chain throughput by doing so.
• Scalability, Decentralization, and Security. bloXroute is designed to allow existing blockchains to maintain their decentralization and security properties while significantly increasing scalability on-chain.
• Grassroots adoption. bloXroute can be implemented without any protocol changes or approval from developers and miners. It can be implemented by individual node operators on a purely bottom-up, grassroots basis. Nodes that adopt bloXroute will start seeing benefits immediately and the more nodes implement bloXroute, the faster blocks will propagate for the entire network.

bloXroute Labs, the company spearheading the bloXroute project, is composed of a founding team from the Cornell University and Northwestern University computer science departments: Uri Klarman (CEO), Emin Gün Sirer (Chief Scientist), Aleksander Kuzmanovic (Chief Architect), and Soumya Basu (CTO). The project is privately funded by Flybridge Capital (Jeff Bussgang), 1confirmation (Nick Tomaino), Metastable (Lucas Ryan), Naval Ravikant, and a small group of cryptocurrency veterans.

We aspire to create a general purpose scalability solution that has a sustainable business model and a broad base of stakeholders from around the world. This can only happen after we prove that our ideas work. Our current focus is demonstrating bloXroute’s claims with various partners. We hope to have more to report on that front in the coming months.

If you are interested in contributing to our vision of making blockchains more scalable on-chain, we’d love to hear from you!

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We’re always looking for good people!

If you’re equally excited to solve the scalability bottleneck for all blockchains, consider joining our team! We are always looking for passionate partners to help us on this important journey. Check out our available positions to work with us in our Chicago offices.

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