Platform or ecosystem? How genEOS improves on EOSIO
genEOS goes beyond even the great strides taken by EOSIO in bringing blockchain to the wider business world in a form that makes adoption quickly rewarding and relatively easy. That’s vital; without it, blockchain technology will never gain sufficient traction to become a normal environment in which to run business applications.
Like EOSIO, genEOS sets out to solve several of the major obstacles to wider blockchain adoption. The benefits of this technology to businesses are clear: Data breaches cost an average $3.6 million; inaccurate record-keeping costs businesses dear, and up to a quarter of worker hours are wasted on repetitive data-entry and retrieval tasks.
Blockchain doesn’t offer to solve these issues as additional or optional features: it addresses them inherently. All blockchains are encrypted, immutable ledgers, meaning record-keeping can be both perfectly accurate and totally automated. And all blockchains are encrypted and modular, meaning leaks are unlikely and large-scale data breaches impossible.
For businesses that seek to take advantage of blockchain’s fundamental security and immutable, automated record-keeping, though, the technology itself has also provided some stumbling-blocks.
Slow processing speeds caused by all-user-participation consensus models like Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work structure could never compete with the speed businesses and consumers — increasingly sharing expectations of app performance — demanded from their applications.
And the security offered by traditional blockchains is a double-edged sword: everything is immutable and encrypted, but any participant can see all of it. That’s fine if it’s a system intended for participants with equal responsibility and access. But not if it’s for a business that doesn’t necessarily want its delivery drivers seeing the same details as its CFO, or that wants to preserve confidentiality obligations by not letting doctors or lawyers see the records of each others’ patients and clients.
Like genEOS, EOSIO’s solution goes beyond an interface that makes building blockchain applications feel more like building traditional web apps. There’s a consensus structure that means scaling the blockchain doesn’t equal slowing the blockchain.
If you’re not too familiar with the technology, it’s not necessarily clear how giant a leap forward that is. On a Bitcoin-like Proof-of-Work blockchain, every participant has to validate each block; going from 100 participants to 10,000 means the blockchain has to handle a hundred times more transactions as all those new users sign off on each block. That means as the blockchain scales, it inevitably slows — a giant obstacle to wider uptake.
By contrast, other consensus models don’t rely on each user signing off. Typically, scalability is achieved by delegated consensus models. The genEOS project uses Delegated proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus, allowing every user a vote on who can be a witness, but intends to keep the number of witnesses to 21. When only those 21 witnesses have to sign off on a new block, adding hundreds, thousands or millions of new users will have the same effect on the blockchain’s speed: none.
EOSIO represents an enormous step forward for blockchain technology. Used by a growing community to develop applications for business on the blockchain, EOSIO has already attracted both significant community interest, and significant investment for its parent company, Block.one.
But we think there’s more to do — both in terms of business success and in terms of creating a blockchain product that drives massive adoption by business.
In fact, we’ve drawn on the lessons learned by EOSIO as well as other industry-leading blockchains, and we’re pretty sure we’ve addressed some major issues before they even arrive.
For instance, we’ve addressed the risk of monopoly. In theory, a blockchain is perfectly decentralized. In practice, it’s possible for some governance models to suffer ‘51% attacks’ — in which one entity or group of entities ‘owns’ 51% of that blockchain’s voting rights. If that happens, the credibility and integrity of the blockchain can be ruined; that majority could sign off on untrue blocks, manipulate cryptocurrency transactions, forge records — all without any systemic, inherent check to stop them.
genEOS isn’t susceptible to this. By using a delegated consensus model and multi-layer governance derived in principle from BitShares, we’ve been able to build a structure that’s immune to attacks like this — whether deliberate or arising naturally.
We’ve talked scalability. But we’ve created an incredibly fast blockchain architecture too, one capable of producing a new block every 0.5 seconds or less and coping with a very high transaction volume. We know it can take hundreds of thousands of transactions a second; we think it might take millions or more.
genEOS surpasses EOSIO in both its ambition, and its potential for business adoption. With technical problems solved from the outset, and with support through every stage of a project built and implemented on genEOS, we expect this to be the blockchain that takes the technology mainstream.
