Introducing Concordium
The Concordium Platform is designed to be fast, secure, and cost-effective. Concordium’s innovative identity layer provides on-chain identity compliance-centric payments and enhanced privacy for users, while also enabling accountability for network participants.
Concordium’s two-layer consensus protocol consists of a Nakamoto-style consensus blockchain and a finality layer for fast confirmation of transactions.
Our sharding design will enable high transaction throughput and private shards for business use cases and sensitive data. Concordium also will enable interoperability and communication between shards and between Concordium and other blockchains.
Concordium has designed new languages for writing smart contract code that makes development easier and smart contracts more reliable.
The Concordium Platform also features a transparent incentive structure with cost-effective transactions and predictable fees.
Let’s dig together deep inside Concordium’s Design approach.
Concordium: An Overview
Regulatory compliance by design
Concordium is designed to integrate with current financial and business systems that require knowledge of a user’s identity. Through the development of unique protocol-level identity primitives, Concordium helps application developers, individuals, and businesses build products that comply with local regulations while retaining the benefits of a privacy-focused, public, and permissionless blockchain.
Both privacy and verification of the identity of users
Concordium’s innovative identity layer provides a compliance-centric balance between anonymity and accountability. A user’s identity is anonymous on-chain however, this anonymity can be revoked and their real-world identity revealed in response to a valid request from a government authority via established legal channels.
From the user’s perspective, anonymity with respect to the general public is maintained and Concordium’s identity layer can accommodate identity providers and anonymity revokers based in different jurisdictions around the world. As such, the Concordium Platform offers a global, multi-jurisdictional solution to the adoption of blockchain technologies across regulatory regimes.
Fast transactions at scale
The Concordium Platform is designed to be fast enough, in terms of transactions per second and the time it takes to finalize a transaction, to meet the needs of any business application on a global scale.
This is a major development compared to previous generations of blockchain technology.
Provable and fast finality
Concordium has developed the first provably secure and fast finality layer to run on top of a Nakamoto-Style (NSC) blockchain. This means that a transaction on the Concordium Platform is confirmed and immutable within a short period of time.
This is a major advantage over other NSC blockchains, where the finality of a block is only assumed after a large number of subsequent blocks have been produced.
Reliable uptime
Concordium is designed for demanding business use cases with strict uptime requirements. Our two-layer consensus design ensures that the platform remains available and secure in the most adverse conditions. We achieve significant speedups and efficiencies under normal conditions, where less than 33% of all stake is controlled by malicious parties.
Unlike some platforms, Concordium also remains available and secure as long as less than 50% of all stake is controlled by malicious parties. Furthermore, the safety of our finality layer holds even under catastrophic failures to the network that causes messages to be delayed much longer than under normal conditions.
High throughput for global scale
Many real-world business applications of blockchain technology have high throughput requirements. To meet these needs, Concordium has developed a novel sharding mechanism that operates in tandem with our finality layer. Concordium can run and coordinate several sub-blockchains in parallel, each much faster than standalone blockchains. Transfers and communication across shards are also supported by a novel design for intershard signaling.
Build private networks on top of Concordium
Concordium understands that some mission-critical applications require dedicated resources and data security. Our platform provides a cost-effective and easy mechanism for businesses, countries or individuals to create their own blockchains using private shards within the Concordium Platform. In the case of a private shard, the Concordium Platform acts as a notary service that confirms transactions without inspecting content or data.
Future-proof via sophisticated interoperability
Interoperability allows transferring data between different blockchains. This is a requirement for wide adoption of blockchain technology, where businesses are not locked into a specific platform. Concordium has developed a novel design for interoperability that allows our platform to send short authenticated messages to other chains and entities without the recipient being required to operate the Concordium Platform.
Easy to use smart contracts fuel business applications
For businesses that rely on smart contracts, it is critical that they operate as intended and without bugs or security issues. Concordium has developed two novel programming languages, Midlang and Retlang, that make smart contracts easier to develop and more reliable to deploy. Midlang, building on the design of Elm and Erlang, models problems clearly and precisely, while also being simple enough to allow for easy on-boarding. Midlang code compiles to Retlang, a new low-level language that allows for formal verification and static analysis of smart contracts. Concordium is also developing tools that will allow formal verification of smart contracts.
A single native token that is easy to model
Global Transaction Unit (GTU) is the native token of the Concordium Platform and the medium of incentivization that ensures network participants are rewarded for their efforts. GTU can be used for a variety of purposes, including payment for the execution of smart contracts, payment via transactions between users, and as a store of value.
Cost-effective transactions
To accommodate businesses that operate at scale, transactions on the Concordium Platform are designed to be cost-effective as well as fast. Low costs are a function of our proof-of-stake, finalization, and sharding design along with incentive mechanisms that prevent excessive charging.
Know transaction costs ahead of time
Transaction costs need to be understood ahead of time in order to build sustainable business models. Concordium uses an innovative price stability mechanism to ensure that transaction costs are fixed in real-world fiat terms despite potential volatility in the price of GTU on the open market.
Transparent token economics and incentives
The economy and incentive structure within the Concordium Platform is transparent and easy to understand. All parameters that control the distribution of rewards, the rate of inflation, and the pricing of transactions will be publicly available. The Concordium Foundation will actively monitor and manage the health of the Concordium economy.
Responsible governance on the road to decentralization
The Concordium Foundation will initially be responsible for all governance and development decisions regarding the platform. Over time, as the platform matures, governance will be decentralized across network participants. In the future, the protocol specifications and codebase for all components of the Concordium Platform will be open-source.
The Team
Concordium has put together a remarkable team of best-in-class engineers, researchers, and business leaders together with a strong advisory board.
With a team built around some of the best cryptographers and computing science researchers, led by Dr. Torben Pedersen, the Concordium Platform is scientifically driven by COBRA (led by Prof. Jesper Buus Nielsen, Prof. Claudio Orlandi, and Prof. Ivan Damgård).
The Concordium Community is actively growing in an organic way with stakers, developers, investors, traders and privacy advocates together with business leaders coming from all over the world. This top-notch Community shares Concordium’s vision and will eventually be responsible for maintaining and governing the ecosystem.
Concordium has been founded by Lars Seier Christensen and is currently managed by Lone Foss Schröder (CEO) together with Jørgen Hauglung (CFO), Tom Graham (CSO) and Beni Issembert (CMO).
Concordium Advisory Board includes Hans-Ole Jochumsen (Former Vice-chair of NASDAQ and FCSE Chair), Peter Klein (EVP, Global Strategy and Solutions, Mastercard), Michael Jackson (Former Skype COO), Prof. Hans Gersbach (ETH Zurich) and Claus Nielsen (Board Member of Kenzi Wealth).
Funding
The Concordium Platform is maintained by The Concordium Foundation, a non-profit vehicle, based in Switzerland and is developed and deployed by Concordium AG, a software company based in Switzerland too. Concordium has completed several rounds of investments (pre-seed and seed) via a SAFT mechanism and will begin a new round of funding in the second part of 2020.
Getting started
We have released in April 2020 the first iteration of Concordium Testnet which will be followed by several other iterations for a Mainnet launch that might occur at the end of 2020.
To discover Concordium Testnet 1, run a node, and get some Testnet GTU on a Web Demo Wallet, please read more here.
Getting involved
The Concordium community includes developers, technologists, investors, business leaders and future users together with privacy advocates from all over the world.
There are many ways to get involved in the Concordium community, e.g.:
- Attending an online Event — coming soon
- Joining of one our Online Communities in Twitter, Discord or Reddit
- Create content and localize existing content, including our White Paper
- Manage local communities
- Joining our Ambassador Program — coming soon
- And many more
To learn more about how getting involved please contact our Marketing Department via email: bi (a) concordium.com
Last update: April 23rd 2020
