MIT Has Developed a New Cryptocurrency that Uses 99% Less Data than Bitcoin
On Jan. 23 in a post on the MITNews Blog, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have purportedly developed a cryptocurrency that requires transaction-verifying nodes to store 99% less data in comparison to Bitcoin (BTC).
Their new cryptocurrency is called Vault and will be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) in February. As per the MITNews blog post, the cryptocurrency allows users to join the network by downloading only a fraction of the total transaction data.
Moreover, Vault reportedly deletes empty accounts and allows for the verification of transactions using only the most recent transaction data. The post also states that during experiments, Vault reduced the bandwidth for joining its network by 99% in comparison to Bitcoin and 90% when compared to Ethereum, making it one of today’s most efficient cryptocurrencies. What’s more, Vault still guarantees that all nodes validate all transactions, offering tight security in line with its existing counterparts.
Vault’s block size limit is 10 megabytes, which is equal to 10,000 transactions, and each one of those blocks contains the hash of the previous block. As MITNews states, to verify Bitcoin transactions, a user needs to download 500,000 blocks totalling approximately 150 gigabytes since they would need to store all account balances to help verify new users and make sure users have enough funds to complete transactions.
Vault is based on a proof-of-stake-based (PoS) blockchain known as Algorand, which was developed by Silvio Micali, the Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT.
The Vault system permits users to verify blocks using information present on a block a few hundred or a thousand blocks in the past, which is known as a “breadcrumb.” This way, a new node joining matches the breadcrumb — or an old block — to a block much further ahead. Derek Lung, who co-wrote the paper, said that one could skip over all blocks in between and the general goal here is to enable cryptocurrencies to scale well for more and more users.
Their article on Vault also states that to join the network, a user needs to download about 90% less data in comparison to Ethereum (ETH).
As Ethereum developers work on using PoS, they are working a new protocol called Casper, which is expected to help lower energy consumption. Last summer, Ethereum developers remarked that they would combine both Casper and sharding — a way of scaling up the number of transactions that a blockchain can process — in an upgrade.
Cointelegraph also reported that a team of researchers from Ivy League United States universities, which includes MIT, have revealed the introduction of a globally scalable decentralized payments network known as Unit-e.
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