How companies can navigate the Wild West of today’s blockchain ecosystems
Piers Ridyard, CEO of Radix DLT, gives an overview to James Bowater, City PM’s Crypto Insider on the benefits independent testing of Distributed Ledger Technology platforms can bring to the industry and why businesses should take note.
The rise of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) startups and cryptocurrencies in the last decade has sparked its fair share of historical analogies, with some pointing to the rise of the internet and the disruption that brought to traditional business models, whereas others have likened it to the speculative gold rush of the nineteenth century. For sure this sector has spawned its fair share of cowboys and snake oil salesmen for it to illicit comparisons with the gold rush, however at Radix the process by which the emerging gold mining industry developed regulatory standards for valuations is where we see some of the most exciting parallels with today.
Investors and startups are confronted with hundreds of blockchain platforms and services making some bold and often wildly optimistic speculative claims that require businesses and real use cases to make a giant leap of faith with their hard earned customer base. This lack of accountability and fear of the unknown is one of the many barriers preventing DLT entering the mainstream and building a stronger, more credible user base. The need for a credible independent arbiter of standards is clear for anyone involved or interested in the sector, and that is why the team at Radix DLT has engaged with ExpoLab at the University of California, Davis under the direction of Professor Mohammad Sadoghi, to conduct mathematical analysis and proofs for the Radix Public Network (RPN).
The team is not only verifying that RPN can process one million transactions per second but also examine how the consensus protocol design fares compared to other mainstream blockchains. UC Davis have pioneered a new exploratory data platform — referred to as ExpoDB — a distributed ledger that unifies secure transactional and real-time analytical processing (L-Store), all centered around a democratic and decentralized computational model (ResilientDB Fabric).ExpoDB’s aim as a platform is to provide people with an interest in different blockchains can see how for instance Radix’s Cerberus protocol compares against other mainstream blockchains.
Transaction histories for businesses or other well-known blockchains such as Bitcoin can be uploaded and tested using ExpoDB framework, participants can see for themselves how well different platforms perform under certain conditions and parameters. The ExpoDB design provides a strong foundation for the further exploration of novel designs that address challenges encountered in fault-tolerant distributed systems. As things currently stand, existing approaches to solve data-intensive problems fail to address the challenges raised by DLT applications. Specifically, the data and computing resources required to process the Big Data datasets that many companies would want tested are prohibitively limiting. ExpoDB addresses this problem by bringing virtualized computing resources closer to data, whether it is at rest or in motion, so people can make real-time evaluations.
The last decade has seen blockchain technology come a long way and create a blueprint for how value and data can be transmitted free from centralised third parties. The potential to disrupt existing business models and create the digital infrastructure of the future has seen an outpouring of technological creativity and high energy start-ups. Out of this crowd the technology platforms for the future economy will emerge however the process for evaluating these platforms remains based on personal intuition and blind luck. The ExpoLab helps create an impartial third party to evaluate the performance and claims that are bandied around by communities and charismatic leaders.
Through mathematical proofs and testing over periods of time, people can see how different blockchains react to set conditions and transaction loads depending on the settings they have marked out. Financial transactions, logistics, data management and industry are set to be transformed by the power of DLT over the course of the next generation, how businesses adapt to this disruption will decide the composition of the future Fortune 500 companies. ExpoLab provides an impartial and objective environment for business leaders and interested parties to weigh up options on offer and decide how they incorporate this technology and which DLT platform best suits their needs and lives up to their claims.
All too often this new and brash industry can appear to be the Wild West, however with the right tools and credible checks people can make secure and informed decisions about how this technology can benefit their companies, shareholders and above all else their customers.
Read more at radixdlt.com