TechCrunch Hackathon Reveals The Power Of Hashgraph: Fast, Usable & Decentralized Apps Created In 24 Hours
By Miles Albert
The success of initial coin offerings (ICOs) as a new fundraising model is undoubtedly attracting an influx of tech talent to develop on Ethereum and other blockchain protocols. With over $1.25B raised this year to date, ICOs have surpassed early-stage venture capital funding. Furthermore, teams have raised tens of millions of dollars with only simple whitepapers describing their ideas. Some ideas are truly innovative and have captured the public’s imagination regarding what is theoretically possible with smart contracts. In practice, however, the vast majority of ICOs are for projects that are not yet feasible due to the technical limitations of blockchains.
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2017, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin sat down with AngelList founder Naval Ravikant to discuss the main hurdles that blockchains must overcome to achieve widespread adoption. Buterin explained that blockchains may be suitable for some niche use cases, but they do not work well for mainstream use due to scaling issues. For instance, Bitcoin and Ethereum are only processing three and five transactions per second (tx/s), respectively. To support Visa, Buterin explained, Ethereum would need to scale to thousands of tx/s, which he believes may happen in the next few years.
The New York Stock Exchange, however, would need tens-of-thousands tx/s. Internet-of-Things, social media networks, massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, and other non-financial applications would need hundreds-of-thousands to millions of tx/s, Buterin continued. Scaling blockchains to this capacity would likely require a significant tradeoff in security. Blockchains, therefore, are unable to support most interesting financial applications, let alone the entire internet. Fortunately, there’s a brand new approach to distributed consensus that does not suffer from the shortcomings of blockchains.
Hashgraph is a blockchain-alternative that achieves high scalability without sacrificing security. It has been proven to handle around 300,000 tx/s in a single network, and is expected to do millions of tx/s with sharding. It is asynchronous byzantine fault tolerant, meaning it has bank-grade security. In addition, Hashgraph is fair in that it serializes all transactions with accurate timestamping, unlike blockchains where miners determine the order in which transactions are placed within each block. It uses an entirely different data structure than blockchains to achieve consensus, and it is a generational leap ahead of Ethereum.
Hashgraph hosted a 24-hour hackathon contest at TechCrunch Disrupt, ironically the day prior to Buterin’s discussion with Ravikant on Ethereum’s scalability issues. A total of nine teams built impressive distributed applications on Hashgraph, ranging from MMO games to a fair auction ledger developed by the Chief Data Scientist at PayPal. Since Hashgraph is written in Java, developers already familiar with the widespread language could immediately get started. These teams only had twenty-four hours, and they didn’t just pitch ideas — they presented real, working prototypes. There were no ICOs.
Kitten Catch
Team: Neil Pomerleau, Jameela Huq
Pitch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6LxWvVDsnk
Kitten Catch demonstrates the potential of Hashgraph to support MMO games. Each device achieves consensus on the state of the game without a central server, meaning that popular games such as Pokémon Go would no longer crash due to player overload. Since Hashgraph has extremely high throughput and low latency, the user experience is seamless, and one can imagine playing an entire first-person shooter game on it.
Fair Auction Ledger
Winning team: Solomon Wu, Amir Youssefi
Pitch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uBU2dWrMW4
In one day, a two-developer team — one of whom is the Chief Data Scientist at PayPal — built the foundation for a decentralized eBay. Fair Auction Ledger, a distributed application designed for hurricane donation auctions via SMS, demonstrates Hashgraph’s ability to support fair markets, where it is essential to know the precise ordering of bids. In other words, the consensus ordering of transactions cannot be manipulated or influenced by any one person in an auction.
Ground Zero
Team: Lance Nanek, Rodaan Peralta-Rabang, Eric Chen, Yosun Chang, Sagar Saija
Pitch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COUErpcVYeM
Ground Zero is a reliable network for disaster relief. As explained in the team’s pitch, several people died during Hurricane Harvey because the response line failed from having too much traffic due to modern response systems being centralized, which results in single points of failure. Because Ground Zero runs on Hashgraph, first responders will always have the information they need in times of disaster.
