A supersonic blockchain technology that cuts out 99% of the bandwidth needed for validating cryptocurrency transactions has been developed by researchers.
A team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has revealed their discovery drastically cuts the data users must hold to join a blockchain to verify transactions.
They reckon the new cryptocurrency Vault reduces the amount of data nodes need to download by up to 99%.
Vault solves the scalability problem for the blockchain.
How new blockchain works
Instead of users downloading hundreds of thousands of blocks of data to verify and manage transactions, users can join the Vault network by downloading a fraction of the data, minimising storage space and processing time.
In testing, joining Vault was 99% quicker for Bitcoin and 90% for Ethereum.
“Currently there are a lot of cryptocurrencies, but they’re hitting bottlenecks related to joining the system as a new user and to storage. The broad goal here is to enable cryptocurrencies to scale well for more and more users,” says paper co-author Derek Leung, a graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
He explained the name Vault was intended as a pun.
Why name is a pun
“The paper title is a pun,” he said. “A vault is a place where you can store money, but the blockchain also lets you ‘vault’ over blocks when joining a network. When I’m bootstrapping, I only need a block from way in the past to verify a block way in the future. I can skip over all blocks in between, which saves us a lot of bandwidth.”
“Each shard of the network is responsible for storing a smaller slice of a big data structure, but this small slice allows users to verify transactions from all other parts of network.”
The Vault blockchain is built on top of a new cryptocurrency called Algorand developed at MIT. Algorand is claimed to be faster, more secure and scalable
Full details of the new cryptocurrency and blockchain work will be revealed in a paper presentation at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium in San Diego, California, next month.
