Our key idea is to combine a centralized approach with a decentralized approach, and thereby achieve the scalability and speed of centralized approaches, while maintaining the decentralized nature of the blockchain.

Introduction

Thunder Protocol combines the speed and scalability of centralized systems with the security of blockchain. This is achieved by using a so-called “Fast Path”. To put it simple: If things are going fine the system goes asynchronously (speed and scalability), if things are going bad the system falls back to a PoW (Proof of Work) blockchain.

Classical consensus vs blockchain

Classical consensus protocols like e.g. PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) can run at thousands of transactions per second. However, if the leader goes offline or acts maliciously the system goes down, but Thunder falls back to blockchain, where consensus still can be achieved, until a new leader has been selected.

Fast Path

When the fast path is active and things are good, the leader/accelerator and 75% of the nodes are online + honest. In that “optimistic” case the system will run with instant confirmations. In that case the leader signs transactions and proposes them to the committee (randomly chosen group of miners who recently mined a block).

Optimistic case

If the leader is offline or behaves maliciously, the protocol falls back to blockchain where the consensus is achieved via proof of work.

Fallback case

Accelerated transactions are also sent to the underlying blockchain, so that the system can fall back to it.

CESC2017 — Rafael Pass — Thunderella

Strengths

Unique approach to the scalability issue

CEO → Chris Wang sold his last company for $500m to Disney

Team size → ~30 people

Scientific backed → Elaine Shi and Rafael Pass (the scientists behind the project) are from Cornell University and published lots of papers

Progress → Broader launch of testnet and launch of “Thunder Chatroom” demo

Weaknesses

It’s not yet sure how often the protocol needs to fall back to the “slow” mode instead of using the accelerated instant confirmation mode

Little information → there is not much information out about the project, they haven’t communicated a lot yet

High evaluation → nothing official, but it seems they raised $70m in private rounds at an evaluation of around $200m

Competition → they will have to face a lot of competition in the protocol space

Conclusion

The project looks really promising. It is backed by a great team and a lot of research. At the moment there is no official information out there about any token sale. After asking in their telegram, they said that the mainnet is going to be launched in Q1 2019 and there will be no ERC-20 placeholder tokens, there will only be mainnet coins.

Definitely subscribe to their telegram channel (see below) to stay up to date. We will publish a rating when all the required information is available.

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