MIT, Stanford Academics Design Cryptocurrency to Better Bitcoin

(Bloomberg) – Some of the brightest minds in America are pooling their brain power to create a cryptocurrency that is designed to do what Bitcoin has proved incapable of: processing thousands of transactions a second.

Professors from seven U.S. colleges including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley have teamed up to create digital currency. The Unit-e, a non-profit foundation, is a non-profit foundation formed by the academics with the backing of hedge funds. Pantera Capital Management LP to develop decentralized technologies.

Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency and the first payment. Yet, while it has built up among developers, anarchists and speculators, mainstream adoption remains elusive.

DTR said in a research paper, that's in no small part of the product of its design, where it has a negative impact on its performance and scalability. Process academics faster than even Visa.

"The mainstream public is aware of these networks do not scale," said Joey Krug, co-chief investment officer at Pantera Capital in San Francisco, who is also a member of the DTR council, said in an interview. "We are on the cusp of something, if you can not scale up soon, it may be relegated to ideas that were nice but you do not work in practice."

DTR plans to launch units in the second half of the year and aims to process as many as 10,000 transactions per second. Second and second transactions for 3.3 and 7 transactions per second for Bitcoin and 10 to 30 transactions for Ethereum. It's also multiples quicker than Visa, a centralized network, which processes around 1,700 transactions per second on average.

Bitcoin's scalability is a function of its design: the frequency within which new blocks are known as their maximum size are capped.

To demonstrate greater speed and scalability, DTR deconstructed the blockchain technology that supports most cryptocurrencies, said Pramod Viswanath, a researcher on the project and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois. Champaign. Said group. "The group first sought to understand the blockchain's performance limits as said.

The academics have published a new research project on the subject of blockchain technology, and increasing speed – and new payment channel networks, to reach their targeted transaction speed.

The cryptocurrency industry is also very aware of the issue. Key efforts include the Lightning Network, which is meant to make crypto payments faster and cheaper by removing the need to record on the blockchain transaction, while another, Segregated Witness, or SegWit, also aims to make transactions faster.

David Chaum, a pioneer of virtual currencies, is also working on a platform that would allow digital money to be traded more quickly.

Success for Unit-e is far from guaranteed. In the short-term there is a risk that the new currency fails to gain traction, said Andrew Miller, head of the Unit and an independent technical steering committee and assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The Swiss-based foundation brings academics from Carnegie Mellon University to the University of Southern California and Washington. It is funded by Pantera and some private individuals, said foundation council Chairman Babak Dastmaltschi, while declining to elaborate further.

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