The development of efficient blockchains has come a long way since 2009 with just about every big financial institution working on incorporating the technology first utilized by the crypto crowd. Scalability continues to be a concern within blockchain world. While many companies are actively working on a wide variety of technical answers to the blockchain scaling question, the industry has yet to establish a dominent, well-functioning system ready for mainstream use. One recent article predicted that Blockchain will burn as much electricity as Denmark in a few years.
Several lead blockchain cryptographers have banded together with experts from companies such as Google, Amazon & Microsoft to create Cypherium a solution for this problem.
Building off Emin Gun Sirer and Bryan Ford’s work on the Bitcoin-NG and ByzCoin protocols, Cypherium wants to be the market-ready solution for scalability.
The group creating Cypherium say it will be leveraging a hybrid PBFT/PoW consensus mechanism to provide optimal on-chain scalability, enabling thousands of transactions per second. This mechanism adopts the idea of decoupling key block mining from micro blocks for faster transaction processing, first pioneered in Bitcoin-NG. Cypherium also says it borrows from ByzCoin to elect a group of validators from recent key block miners, ultimately allowing said groups to commit transactions collectively.
Additionally, Cypherium is described as having a light-weight sandbox environment that separates testing and production, while supporting consensus self-upgrades. By bringing governance on chain, Cypherium will avoid hard-forks and ultimately allow network participants to adaptively adjust transaction block sizes as well as other proposed protocol upgrades.
“Cypherium has shown promise to mitigate the scalability problem that permission-less blockchains are currently facing,” stated Sky Guo, CEO of Cyphereum. “We have all seen problems with scalability that have inconvenienced and angered many. We are happy to provide a resolution to one of blockchain’s largest criticisms.”