On 5/16/2018, a paper began circulating on social media, which had been anonymously authored and shared on IPFS. The paper describes a “new family of leaderless Byzantine fault tolerance protocols”, including a practical algorithm called Avalanche.

Although the paper’s author(s) remain anonymous, a startup called Perlin announced plans to build a decentralized computation platform using Avalanche. Perlin attracted vast attention from the cryptocurrency and ICO investment community, in part due to excitement around Avalanche and its perceived potential.

We at OpenToken found Avalanche fascinating and novel, so we were naturally drawn to Perlin and its potential. Fortunately, we were able…

This is a summary of our full whitepaper review published here.

Hashgraph is a project that replaces the “chain” in blockchain with a more efficient graph data structure. Hashgraph is proprietary, owned by a US company called Swirlds. Similarly to Ripple, they are focusing on enterprise partnerships, but have a Java SDK that anyone can use non-commercially. The technology is described in a 2016 whitepaper, which we explain and evaluate in detail.

At it’s core, Hashgraph is a distributed algorithm that participants use to agree on transactions without trusting one another. The paper describes a “permissioned” setting, meaning that there…

Note: This is the first in a series of whitepaper reviews on blockchain and consensus, published by OpenToken. Next time, we’ll look at DFINITY.

We’ve been getting a lot of questions about Hashgraph recently. Although you can find plenty of great documentation on Hashgraph’s website, only a few external resources cover it in detail. With this post, we hope to provide a useful overview and evaluation for the whole community, while still covering enough technical nitty-gritty to entertain even the most die-hard distributed systems folks.

We’re going to focus on the technology here, but just to answer the easy questions…