In the 1990s, different works appeared on decentralized solutions to make electronic payments that laid the foundations for the birth of Blockchain technology: public-key cryptography, P2P networks, and timestamping.
Beginning
Blockchain, back in 1991 when the first work of a secure blockchain using cryptography, appeared under the authorship of Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta. A year later, they incorporated Merkle trees to improve their prototype’s efficiency in handling tamper-proof digital documents.
However, Haber and Stornetta’s work was not used and their patent expired in 2004, four years before the birth of Bitcoin.
In 1998, Wei Dai described a decentralized solution for electronic payments based on public-key cryptography, which would lay the foundation for the transfer of digital properties.
In 2004, computer scientist and crypto activist Hal Finney introduced a system called RPoW, which allowed the first digital transfer of tokens by solving the problem of double-spending.
In 2008, based on Finney’s model, Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin under a P2P system that shields transactions and verifies them in a fully decentralized network instead of the RPoW system.
Since then, Blockchain technology has evolved to allow a set of scripts in the form of “Ethereum” smart contracts to web3 solutions that we see today with multiple existing platforms on the market.
How Blockchain has Evolved
- Blockchain 1.0: The Early Years
The first version of Blockchain can be located in the timeline between 1991 and 2008, which marks the beginning of Blockchain and the first successful application of Blockchain technology, the birth of Bitcoin.
Nakamoto conceptualized the first Blockchain in 2008 through his proposed ‘Bitcoin Whitepaper’, which outlined the details of how blockchain technology was well equipped to enhance digital trust.
2. Blockchain 2.0: Welcome Ethereum and Smart Contracts
After the birth of Bitcoin, there were many diatribes among the community to improve the Bitcoin ecosystem by taking advantage of the potential of Blockchain technology.
In the absence of consensus, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Bitcoin magazine and one of the Bitcoin network’s first collaborators, developed his own version of Blockchain to execute programmable scripts for certain use cases beyond digital payments.
And in 2015, it delivered Ethereum, a decentralized public network that became popular today, hosting millions of transactions and decentralized applications (DApps) used in finance, gaming, education, logistics, health, and many other sectors.
Together with Ethereum, proposals such as Zcash, Monero and DASH were born and focused on improving the privacy and scalability limit on Bitcoin.
Chronologically, this period of Blockchain is placed by specialists in parallel to the birth of Bitcoin “2008” and its rival, Ethereum “2015”.
3. Blockchain 3.0: web3 as the Future
The history of Blockchain technology does not stop with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum but goes forward with their respective decentralized networks. Due to the scalability problem of these networks, some Blockchain applications arose to take the massification of technology to a higher level.
It is how we see the emergence of new Blockchain platforms such as Polkadot, FLETA and NEO, which are in the race to accelerate the development of technology. They have emerged with substantial improvements to generate decentralized applications with superior performance to handle the demand existing today.
It is worth noting that the cases mentioned above include the so-called public(open source) blockchains and the private or federated ones, built by some corporations or associations such as R3 from Corda and Hyperledger from Linux.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Blockchain Versions
Bitcoin has been the forerunner of the application of Blockchain technology in all its brilliance, being the most secure decentralized network in the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem available.
However, the limitations inherent in its original foundation make it impossible for it to be handled for some useful cases beyond a payment system or store of value.
For the second generation Blockchains such as Ethereum, scalability problems have proven to be one of the pending aspects to be solved with ETH 2.0.
It is important to note that new third-generation platforms will be responsible for maintaining the Blockchain boom and increasing its adoption.
Problems such as interoperability, scalability, and high transaction costs are solved in recent projects such as FLETA, which guarantees an improved technological foundation to allow Blockchain adoption in any sector necessary to apply the distributed concept.
Thanks to its block redesign, the use of sharding parallel and its own improved Proof of Formulation(PoF) algorithm, the key aspect of interoperability between chains is a reality within the Fleta ecosystem. It allows faster transactions under a real environment at a very low cost, compared to the first and second generation blockchains.
Conclusion
The future of Blockchain technology looks bright. Much of this is due to the substantial improvements introduced to the ecosystem by new players such as FLETA, with technological foundations that allow it to handle the growing demand for decentralized applications.
Blockchain technology is expected to help automate the majority of tasks handled by professionals in all sectors. Additionally, the way governments and businesses are waging this new digital battle makes the future look promising for one of the greatest inventions of all time.
***
About FLETA
FLETA is a blockchain platform that aims to offer infrastructure that can be applied to real-world business models. FLETA has its own core blockchain technologies like Level Tree Validation, Parallel Sharding, Independent multi-chain Structure, Block Redesign, and PoF(Proof-of-Formulation) which is its own consensus algorithm. With them, it aims to solve the problems that existing platforms have such as slow speeds, scalability limitations and excessive fees, and provide a flexible development environment. Moreover, its Gateway technology improved its interoperability by allowing projects issuing their tokens through other mainnets to maintain their mainnets while using the FLETA chain.
***
Feel free to join and connect with us through our official channels below:
Website: https://fleta.io
FLETA Store: https://fleta.ogn.app/#/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/fletachain
Telegram: https://t.me/FLETAofficialGroup
Github: https://github.com/fletaio
