At Cypherium, our focus has always been on development. After noticing a number of significant technological shortcomings in predominant blockchain technologies, our CEO Sky Guo devised the software blueprints for this project back in 2016. He — along with a team of skilled developers with working experience at Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Tencent — set out to build a distributed ledger technology that could scale without abandoning the key principle that has inspired the current blockchain revolution: true decentralization.
In our path toward making that goal a reality, Cypherium has been hard at work preparing for the release of our testnet, with the support of incredible partners including IC3, US Faster Payments Council, bloXroute labs, and advisors such as Augur’s Jeremy Gardener and Cornell Professor Emin Gun Sirer.
Today, we are very proud to announce that we have just completed our full testnet client, delivering on the promise of the original whitepaper that has drawn significant interest over the last year and a half.
Cypherium’s public blockchain employs an innovative dual chain structure, which decouples the mining process into two types of blocks — one for minting blocks and another for verifying those blocks of information while accepting them to the network. The minting chain uses classic Proof-of-Work to determine which node can be trusted to write a new keyblock. Then, the transaction chain allows other nodes to verify lists of transactions by participating in a validation committee by adopting the practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance ( protocols of Bitcoin-NG and ByzCoin.
Together, these two chains form a hybrid consensus mechanism that delivers unprecedented speeds of up to 5,000 transactions per second without sacrificing the principles of decentralization.
To achieve this impressive throughput, Cypherium uses small block sizes, taking inspiration from the small data packets and high-frequency transmission of TCP/IP. Unlike Bitcoin’s sluggish 1MB blocks and its corresponding glacial transaction pace, Cypherium’s throughput has no restrictive upper limit, which allows for a much more powerful, variable, and rapid transaction throughput.
This testnet launch also presents the public release of the Cypherium Virtual Machine (CVM), a Turing-complete virtual machine that provides the runtime environment for all contracts written and executed on the Cypherium network. The CVM offers horizontal integration with any contracts written in Ethereum’s Solidity language and, perhaps more crucially, allows the crypto space to leverage the full power of the community Java developers and devices for the first time. Based on the Dalvik architecture previously used in Google’s Android system, the CVM runs contracts written in Java so that Cypherium can be used on any device capable of running the programming language. This is a monumental milestone for the blockchain industry, as Java claims the largest developer community of any programming language in the world and runs on over three billion devices worldwide from jet airplanes to credit cards and beyond.
As we push forward in 2019 and continue working tirelessly toward our mainnet launch, one of our goals is to enable public mining for those interested in Cyphers ahead of the mainnet launch. While Cyphers will only be available in this capacity until the mainnet launches, the team will announce specs for public mining shortly after the network is deployed — please stay tuned.
Of the blockchain projects that have started in the past two years, over 90% have failed or squandered their initial value, especially in the 2018 bear market. Cypherium’s perseverance has to do in large part with its insistent focus on developing and delivering a provable, enterprise-ready product. Instead of chasing the hype, Sky and his dev team have done what so many influential voices in the blockchain space have failed to do: keep their head down and deliver. With this fast, scalable, and fully decentralized public network, Cypherium has done just that.
To feel the speed of Cypherium, go to our blockchain explorer: https://explorer.cypherium.io/
