BitShares, a blockchain-based financial smart contract platform has announced the upgrade of BitShares 2.0. The platform is now built on a system known as “Graphene toolkit,” which is developed by an independent blockchain development company founded by the core developers of BitShares, called Cryptonomex Inc.

With the implementation of a new crypto-technology called SmartChains, the soon-to-be released BitShares 2.0 reportedly is set to have the “Speed of the NASDAQ,” with a new “high-performance protocol and engine, capable of handling over 100,000 transactions per second.

”To test its efficiency and capability of the technology, the BitShares team had set up a pilot blockchain with 200,000 accounts, and issued an asset to every account, which involved around a million operations/transactions. After the creation of the blockchain, the BitShares team timed the duration of reindexing the blockchain without signature verification.

According to the press release of BitShares, “A single core of a 2.6 Ghz i7 is able to validate 10,000 signatures per second. Today’s high-end servers with 36 cores (72 with hyper-threading) could easily validate 100,000 transactions per second.”

Criticisms and Improvements

Previously, BitShares received criticisms from the cryptocurrency community and blockchain developers that the slow and inefficient performance of the platform negatively affects user experience, and that the model object fails to engage real-world usage.

As a response to the suggestions, the core developers of BitShares have designed a high performance blockchain technology specifically for cryptocurrencies and smart contract transfers. According to its developers, the newly built platform is designed to confirm transactions in just one second, allowing the system to process more transactions per second than MasterCard and VISA combined.During the beta operation of BitShares, users also indicated two major problems with the previous version of BitShares:

Nonstandard market matching algorithm discourages traders Insufficient incentives for new stakeholders to help grow the network.

Incentives and Rewards

To better incentivize and reward its users, BitShares has also introduced a referral rewards program, built directly into the software. Recognizing that the value of the BitShares network is derived from its user base, the platform is set to reward its users that encourage others to join the network in an automated way.

BitShares 2.0 is set to enter a public testing period for community feedback upon its completion, which will continue until everyone in the community is satisfied with the platform.

BitShares core development team is also planning to outsource some of the platform’s operations to Cryptonomex Inc., to create a “more robust, sustainable, and fair” smart contracts platform.