$ 35 Million: Sequoia, Baidu Back Turing Award Winner's Blockchain Project

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A group of university professors and researchers including a Turing award winner have raised $ 35 million for a non-profit foundation.

Announced Tuesday, the Conflux Foundation is registered in Singapore and will use the proceeds to fuel its network. Backers include venture capital firms Sequoia China and Baidu Ventures, crypto mining firm F2Pool and exchange Huobi, as well as Metastable and IMO Ventures.

With the new capital, the foundation said it is now looking to expand its 10-person development team. The goal: roll out to testing environment in February and officially launch to new public blockchain around the third quarter of next year.

The project was co-founded by scholars from the University of Toronto and China's Tsinghua University, including Dr. Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, a Turing Award winner and an information sciences professor at Tsinghua. Named for renowned mathematician Alan Turing, the Turing award is given out year by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and is considered a kind of Nobel prize for computer science.

According to an academic paper published in May, the group conducted a month-long experiment for the Conflux prototype late last year. The use of the bitcoin blockchain but changed the protocol from the Nakamoto consensus model, named for the bitcoin's creator, to Conflux's own design.

"We implemented a prototype of Conflux and evaluated Conflux by deploying up to 20k Conflux full nodes on 800 Amazon EC2 virtual machines," the paper stated. "The throughput is equivalent to 6,400 transactions per second for typical bitcoin transactions."

Scalability push

In an interview with CoinDesk, Dr. Fan Long, a co-founder of the project and an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, said the key design decision blocks are ordered.

Currently, most blockchains work in a linear way in which only one can be produced. The network relies on nodes to agree on which one will continue the chain.

This is a feature of blockchain results in a bottleneck that is problematic for most public networks, especially those that are like that and that aim to power smart contracts and decentralized applications.

"Someone has a higher scalability," Long said.

Concurrently to boost the volume of transactions.

The concept of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) is to be forks, or the emergence of two competing versions of the ledger. sequence by the network.

Looking ahead

It will develop its own infrastructure for the public launch next year as the team hopes to include smart contract features.

Further, the foundation said its investors, such as Baidu, will commit to using the network for future development.

CryptoKitties clogged that public to the public blockchain network .

"That goal sounds easy and is similar to what every other project is saying. But it's actually really difficult, "Long said, concluding:

"Because what we need is a highly productive public network for high-value applications, not just several blockchain-based games."

Andrew Yao image courtesy of the Conflux Foundation

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