Researchers Vow to Build a Better Blockchain Network Immune from Scalability Issues

A group of researchers and university professors have teamed up to resolve one of the most painstaking issues preventing Bitcoin’s underlying technology to emerge a handy, real-world ledger: scalability. The team, which includes a Turing award winner, is off to a good start already after scoring $35 million in funding from a number of investors.

Full-fledged Launch Expected in Q3 2019

Announced on December 3, 2018, the group has united under the umbrella of a non-profit called Conflux Foundation. Registered in Singapore, Conflux has already gained traction in the investors-community with heavyweights like Baidu Ventures, crypto exchange Huobi, crypto mining firm F2Pool, and the Chinese arm of Sequoia Capital, chipping in to turn the project into a success.Conflux has stated that it is going to utilize the newly raised fund in raising a ten-person development team and take things forward from there. Their roadmap includes the launch of a testing environment in February 2019, which is to be followed by the official release of a new public blockchain sometime during Q3 2019. So how does Conflux plan on resolving Bitcoin’s speed issue?For starters, the limitation of Bitcoin’s underlying ledger is that it can add only one block at a time to the chain. While blockchain developers have done their bit to get around this issue with innovative tweaks, there is no foolproof permanent solution to this issue. Adding multiple blocks simultaneously to the blockchain could cause it to fork, creating two different chains. Conflux claims to have a solution to this problem. According to the nonprofit, its researchers have figured a way which could allow one to work on blocks simultaneously and add them to the chain in one action. While details are still sketchy, the research team is convinced that not only does this method prevent a hard fork, but it also doesn’t lead to any compromise to the decentralized method of consensus (hence it’s impossible for any single party to assume full control over the blockchain).

No Need for an ICO

Conflux has made it clear that it intends to remain a nonprofit foundation. The investors backing the project have stakes in the firm in addition to access to a digital token whose value could appreciate in the future. As for the long-term objective of the new initiative, Fan Long, of the project’s cofounders, said that the ultimate goal is to develop a scalable public blockchain that serves as a reliable platform for smart contracts and can deliver decentralized applications.