It was merely last year that a group of American professors collaborated and formed a non-profit foundation by the name Distributed Technology Research (DTR). Now the brightest minds under the foundation have come up with their first project-Unit-e, a cryptocurrency they claim to process about 10,000 transactions per second.
Could Unit-e Dethrone Bitcoin?
Satoshi Nakamoto’s (the mastermind of bitcoin) real identity remains a mystery, but now at least we all know who’s willing to throw a challenge at him- DTR. Under the mantle of DTR, backed by Pantera Capital mainly for developing the next-generation digital currencies for broader adoption, are presenting Unit-e.
The proposed cryptocurrency is to launch later this year, and it has been claimed that it will do what the giant coin has proved incapable of doing: processing about 10,000 transactions per second. Perhaps, the purpose of the currency is to solve the scalability problem of bitcoin that has continuously been the target for the critics all the years.
Interestingly, the virtual coin in the making is claimed to beat Visa’s throughput which boasts below 2,000 transactions per second. Comparing to bitcoin’s 7 TPS and Ethereum’s 30 TPS, Unit-e will surely be miles away from the current state of transactions.
Redefining Blockchain
DTR did their homework and had to deconstruct the blockchain technology which supports the cryptocurrencies to come up with scalability as well as higher speeds. According to Pramod Viswanath, a researcher on DTR and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois, they sought to improve most elements of the blockchain.
The performance limits of blockchain were the target, and then technologies designed that will operate close to the limits as much as possible. The lightening network is for instance supposed to make the payments faster as well as cheaper without the need of recording each transaction on the blockchain.
The new methods of sharding that allow partitioning blockchains is another new method apart from the payment networks created. Success is not yet guaranteed for Unit-e, but in the long-term, it’s the best technology that will carry the day. Whether Unit-e will dethrone bitcoin or not, is a matter of time that will tell.
