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Official Taraxa Project FAQ (work in progress)

Steven Pu
Taraxa Project
Published in
4 min readMay 15, 2018

Last updated: January 27, 2019

GENERAL QUESTIONS

1. What are the communication channels for Taraxa?

2. Where is the team located?

Our core team development team is part of Phragmites, Inc. located in Santa Clara, California. Our team is distributed in the US, Japan, China, Ukraine, Finland, and Croatia. As our project matures we intend to develop a truly global and decentralized developer community.

Our foundation is currently located in Panama per the advice of and set up with the assistance of our legal counsel Fenwick & West.

3. Any investment details?

Since we began the project, the regulatory environment has been constantly shifting. For long-time followers of our project, you’ll note a few changes.

We raised two rounds of funding in 2018, seed and private sale. These funds were raised to help build a full time team to accelerate the development progress of the project and drive adoption of the Taraxa blockchain. These rounds have given us a comfortable runway to complete these goals, and we fully intend to deliver on our promise to our investors and our community supporters.

Given how quickly things change in this space, we’re unsure what shape the next round of investment will take. We’re constantly monitoring the market and in communication with our legal counsel, and will communicate any and all decisions promptly with the community.

4. How many tokens will there be total?

There will eventually be 2⁵³ -1 tokens, or 9,007,199,254,740,991 tokens.

We wanted to select a large number, since we expect there will be trillions upon trillions of devices connected to the Taraxa network. The number we selected is the largest safe integer in the Javascript language, and that was the basis for our choice. The large number is also selected because we wanted to avoid using floating points, as they tend to be implemented quite differently across different hardware platforms, potentially producing non-deterministic results.

Because there are so many tokens, they will likely be traded in millions or billions at a time. So if you trade them 1 million at a time, there are about 9 billion units. If you trade them 1 billion at a time, there are about 9 million units.

5. What’s the relationship with Nano?

We originally planned to reference our ledger topology on block-lattice as pioneered by the Nano project. However we’ve since moved away from it. Please see a brief explanation of why our project is no longer referencing the block-lattice topology in our first 2019 update.

However, we have not forgotten that a significant chunk of our supporters come from the Nano community and we would not be here today if it weren’t for your support — something that will definitely be taken into account in our future distribution plans.

TECH RELATED QUESTIONS

6. Will Taraxa be open source?

Absolutely. We’re developing in a private Github right now and will open it to the public as soon as we have working prototypes.

7. Why is Taraxa’s smart contract system fast?

Taraxa employs both horizontal as well as vertical concurrency to address scalability issues facing the blockchain space today.

In vertical concurrency, Taraxa provides a concurrency engine on top of the VM to allow hundreds of smart contract calls to be processed in parallel, and a set of concurrent data structures (objects) linked into the VM to minimize any conflicts that processing these smart contracts might run into. Much of this design is based on the principles of software transactional memory’s (STM) speculative concurrency algorithms. This is fast because all other blockchain systems today process smart contracts sequentially.

In horizontal concurrency, we have a set of fuzzy state-transition sharding governed by cryptographic sortition (term coined by Professor Maurice Herlihy, our advisor) that splits the work among nodes in the network at the same time dynamically (according to network conditions) capping the block generation rate. For scaling on a much larger scale, we plan to employ child-chain driven state-sharding, which has been a relatively well-studied approach.

8. What’s the big deal with light nodes?

Since IoT devices are highly resource-constrained in both processing and storage capabilities, they are unable to perform the duties of full nodes. Conventional blockchain light node design simply requires light nodes to blindly trust another full node, which would be appropriate under certain use cases but not all. We believe that light nodes should have the capability to remain independent participants on the network.

Taraxa will introduce a series of lighter (it’s a spectrum) node designs that are aimed to make devices more independent and trustless. These currently include randomized sampling of the network to prevent deception from full nodes, proposing and validating with partial confidence smaller blocks, and hardware designs to accelerate basic cryptographic primitives. Details are forthcoming, stay tuned.

9. Will there be atomic swaps with Nano?

We are looking to develop atomic swap capabilities later on with all types of currencies. We believe that atomic swaps will be a mandatory capability later on for all types of cryptocurrencies to facilitate frictionless trading between ecosystems, so it’s not really a matter of whether or not we want to support it, pretty soon it’ll be a mandatory feature for any public ledger.

Blockchain
Taraxa
FAQ
Taraxa Community

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Steven Pu
Taraxa Project

Written by Steven Pu

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