By: Eyal Markovich, COO

The bloXroute team has made considerable headway on building and deploying our blockchain scalability solution since our previous roadmap update in July. In line with our strategy of putting the technology first, we have doubled our tech team over the last quarter. This has allowed us to move faster with development, making significant progress on developing Version 1 (V1) of our product — the Blockchain Distribution Network (BDN) — and building our Proof of Concept (PoC) to *show* how we solve the scalability bottleneck. Additionally, we opened a new satellite office in Israel to support this rapid development.

Version 1

Version 1 of the bloXroute BDN will be released in Q1 2019. V1 of our product will be a fully operational network with at least 15 nodes across 5 continents. As activity levels increase, we will scale up the network; we are targeting 30–50 nodes in Q3 2019. The API will support both Bitcoin and Ethereum gateways to start, including both PoW and PoS. We are prioritizing Ethereum and Bitcoin because they account for more than 50% of blockchains globally, however, anyone can use the bloXroute BDN through our open API. For more information on the BDN and how it scales all blockchains, you can read our previous blog post here.

Below is the progress we’ve made on V1:

After launch we will continuously innovate and improve the technology. We are close to finalizing our list of features for V2, which includes, among other features, increasing the number of interfaces for other systems and increasing the overall performance of our product.

PoC

We are in the final stages of building a comprehensive PoC to release before the V1 launch to show how we remove the scalability bottleneck. To do this, we deployed a Bitcoin network, using the Bitcoin Unlimited code base, so that we could show Bitcoin’s transactions per second (TPS) with and without the bloXroute BDN. Yan Pritzker our Senior DevOps Engineer wrote a three part Medium post on how to bring up a Bitcoin network for development and research. We chose Bitcoin Unlimited’s 1GigPerf branch because it supports large block sizes and has improvements to the mempool acceptance process (from single-threaded to multi-threaded). We are also working on a publicly accessible dashboard to demo the PoC results.

The Team

Our team has grown considerably over the past few months, with a strong focus on growing the tech team. We doubled the size of our engineering team over the past quarter and plan on hiring another five engineers by early next year. Our need for developer talent has outgrown the speed at which we can hire locally in Chicago. Thus, we opened a Development Site in Israel led by our Israel Site Manager, Uri Margalit, who we have enjoyed working with in the past. There is an abundance of high-tech talent and opportunity in Israel, making it the perfect location for a satellite office to support our Chicago Headquarters.

Additionally, we hired a Marketing Associate, and a Graphic Designer. Our Graphic Designer specializes in CryptoArt, so you may recognize some of her artwork displayed at Voice of Blockchain in Chicago and Bitcoin Art (r)evolution in Paris. We are very excited to put her design skills to use and launch a revamped website, explainer video, and other resources in the coming weeks.

Conclusion

Thank you again for the continued support on our journey to solve the blockchain scalability problem. The best way to stay up to date regarding our Version 1 launch, PoC release, and other company information is by following us on twitter @bloxroutelabs.

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We’re always looking for good people!

If you’re equally excited to solve the scalability bottleneck for all blockchains, consider joining our team! We are always looking for passionate partners to help us on this important journey. Check out our available positions to work with us in our Chicago offices.

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