Unit-e and David Chaum’s Elixxir promise next-gen crypto

Two new cryptocurrencies that are being developed by stellar teams promise to deliver important improvements over today’s cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, especially in terms of scalability (transaction throughput) and privacy, Bloomberg reports.

The Bloomberg article is mainly focused on Unit-e, a new decentralized technology development project developed by Distributed Technology Research (DTR), a non-profit foundation formed by high-profile academics from institutions including MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, with funding from Pantera Capital Management.

Bitcoin has shown us that “distributed trust is possible but its just not scaling at a dimension that could make it a truly global everyday money,” says DTR researcher Pramod Viswanath, a professor at UI Urbana-Champaign.

“It was a breakthrough that has the capacity to change human lives but that won’t happen unless the technology can be scaled up.”

As reported by a DTR press release, Joey Krug, Co-Chief Investment Officer at Pantera Capital Management, adds:

“A lack of scalability is holding back cryptocurrency adoption, and DTR’s groundbreaking research is addressing this. The Unit-e developers are turning this research into real scalable performance which will benefit a huge swath of decentralized financial applications.”

Babak Dastmaltschi, Chairman of the DTR Foundation Council, says:

“Advancements in distributed technologies will enable open networks, avoiding the need for centralized authorities. DTR was formed with the goal of enabling and supporting this revolution, and it is in this vein that we unveil Unit-e.”

DTR plans to launch Unit-e in the second half of the year and aims to process as many as 10,000 transactions per second, higher than the centralized Visa network and a dramatic improvement over the Bitcoin and Ethereum base networks.

The 170-page DTR white paper, titled “Decentralized Payment Systems: Principles and Design,” provides a detailed overview of DTR’s project.

Since the DTR team want to make Unit-e a mainstream payment system, one wonders about their attitude to privacy. The DTR white paper notes that “regulatory compliance checks (e.g., KYC/AML requirements) can be managed by applications sitting on top of the Unit-e stack,” but the base technology layer is inspired by solid cryptography, including zero-knowledge proofs.

The other new cryptocurrency development project mentioned (in passing) by Bloomberg is spearheaded by legendary cryptographer David Chaum, who in the 1980s developed ecash, a pre-Bitcoin anonymous cryptocurrency, and founded DigiCash.

With his new project, dubbed Elixxir, Chaum wants to produce a major innovation in blockchain technology:

“Elixxir is a significant step forward in blockchain technology providing users with a confidential and secure decentralized platform capable of scaling to meet the demands of mainstream adoption without compromising its characteristic high transaction rates and short processing times.”

A press release claims that Elixxir will enable fast, secure and confidential messaging and payments at minimal cost:

“The Elixxir blockchain can scale to hundreds of thousands of transactions each second, each message or payment delivered or confirmed within seconds, efficiently enabling use as a smartphone app.”

Elixxir has received strategic investments from lead players in the blockchain industry. According to the current version of the Elixxir Technical Brief, Elixxir will offer:

“Speed: Payment completion and message transmission are completed in a matter of seconds.
Transactional privacy: Only senders and receivers can review and prove payment history. Transaction data is not stored on the blockchain.
Communication privacy: The identity of communicating parties and their devices remains private.”

It seems that both Unit-e and Elixxir are promising very substantial (and perhaps game-changing) improvements in the two most critical aspects of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, throughput and privacy, with the former more focused on throughput and the latter more focused on privacy.

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