At present, the popularity of blockchain technology is quite astonishing. While it is not only brushing aside the ordinary people’s use of their Social Newtorking Service account, it also keeps the crypto thought leaders awake, deeply anxious and sleepless at three o’clock in the morning.
As the blockchain presence on the Internet gains strength and momentum, the reality on the ground is that it is weakened by the day. An embarrassing fact is that the blockchain technology has been slow to kick start its utility from the ground up. It means that we are unable to use it in our daily life and there are not many Decentralised Application (DApp) that has been successfully released using blockchain technology.
Since Ethereum was created in 2015, technology geeks and users are expected to implement blockchain technology using Dapps for daily usage. However, four years on, developers have deployed a plethora of projects using the Ethereum platform, but many are not good enough to be remembered.
The reasons for it are due to high transaction (TX) fees and ultra-low transactions per second (TPS) throughput per block created on the blockchain.
As is commonly known, the Gas mechanism is essentially used in transactions. It is the basis for transacting in the entire Ethereum platform. It guarantees the stable operation of the Ethereum ecosystem under three elements: security, rational utilisation of computing resources, and miners.
Ethereum uses Gas for calculating transaction cost, and any other incidental costs. It prevents excessive usage of resources and useless transactions hogging the network. It also prevents the malicious trading attacks. While at the same time, Ethereum is essentially a distributed ledger, all operations are considered as a transaction by default. For developers and smart contracts creators the cost is heavy. According to statistics, a smart contract call from the DApp costs approximately $1–3 each time it is executed on the blockchain. Imagine a scenario of developing a social networking software Dapp on Ethereum, and users are required to pay a TX fee when they do routine operations like commenting, retweeting and collecting information. It is obviously that such a DApp will not be looked at favorably by anyone. Consequently, this Dapp has no market prospect.
Another important reason is the network congestion problem on the Ethereum Mainnet. At the moment, the TPS of Ethereum is 8–15 per second, and imagine how many transactions are created every second on the Ethereum Mainnet, Therefore, one will quickly realise that the Ethereum blockchain has a serious scaling problem.
At present, Ethereum has a high market capitalisation. Due to inherent design flaws, Vitalik Buterin proposed a subdivision technology. On one hand, this implementation is difficult, but on the other hand, it takes a long timeframe to deliver it, These gives the other blockchains an opportunity to overtake Ethereum’s market capitalisation.
In 2018, whoever is able to provide the underlying technology for large-scale commercial use will be able to attract a large number of DApp developers. It will be able to compete with Ethereum.
Depending on the market sentiment and faith in 2018, we rely on capital control to stabilise the price of the fait currency. However, it will not last for a long time. When the game is up, you will see who is caught out. Bear market sentiment is actually a good time to choose gold from sand. The general blockchain that can survive and go far in the future can only be achieved by technology which really drives the practical application.
A general chain that enables DApp to ‘hit the ground’ running, in addition to security, also needs to resolve the problem of handling high transaction fees, network congestion and the issue of scalability.
At present, there are two common chains that can resolve the handling fee and network congestion problem well by realising zero TX fee and high throughput by TPS.
EOS.
The white paper of EOS states that TPS level can reach millions. Later after questioning by many people, EOS has changed to several thousand per seconds. It has a very surprising speed which is at least more than one hundred times faster compared to the Ethereum transaction speed. At the same time, the EOS is free of charges when used by ordinary users, namely zero TX charge.
The reason why EOS can achieve high TPS is because it uses Masternodes, and any transaction requires only those 21 nodes to verify and pass. To this point, the founder Vitalik Buterin repeatedly attacks the system for not being safe enough, because it is not decentralized enough, it is sacrificing safety to meet efficiency.
EOS’s main network is expected to be completed in June this year. We will see how secure it would be.
Another general blockchain that can achieve zero TX fee and high TPS at the same time is the hard fork of Ethereum called EtherZero. This chain is not well-known at the moment. It is more well-known abroad than domestically.
Zero TX fee in EtherZero is derived from its logical design. It retains the gas mechanism of the Ethereum, but does not deduct the cost in each operation, thus preserving the advantages of the gas mechanism and preventing DDOS attacks. At the same time, it designed some transaction thresholds and restrictions to prevent garbage trading.
For high TPS throughput, the masternode double-layer network mechanism is adopted, which is divided into the Masternode layer and the bookkeeping layer. The transaction is verified by the Masternode and returns the transaction result. The Masternode layer then broadcasts the transaction to the bookkeeping layer, packaging the block, and TPS can reach the 10,000 level.
The keccak algorithm is adopted for the authentication mechanism of the Masternode layer in the EtherZero architecture. It randomly selects 10 masternodes among all the Masternodes. So as long as 6 of them have verified the transaction, the verification process is completed. Because the Masternode is selected randomly according to the hash head of the block, the algorithm will not allow cheating in the logic. There is no problem with security. It is also worth mentioning that EtherZero plans to adopt sharding technology to solve the problem of wasting Masternode resources found in DASH cryptocurrency system.
It is reported that in June this year, EtherZero will also complete the construction of the double-layer network and the actual outcome remains to be seen. If it did what it promises in the WP, EtherZero’s future is unlimited.
After the battle of the cryptocurrencies in 2017, the whole cryptomarket needs to be reorganised and reshuffled, Their respective technology is the only way to ‘shuffle the cards’.
In the not too distant future, whoever got Dapp for the day to day running is a strong contender to win the battle. I am looking forward to a general chain that will allow the blockchain technology to actually deliver and meet people’s daily use. When that happens, a new world crypto order begins.
