Scalability has been one of the major issues that have act as hurdles between the large-scale adoption of the blockchain technology in the modern infrastructures. As we see today, the transaction per second (TPS) rates of some of the prominent cryptocurrencies of the world such as bitcoin, ethereum etc. are very low as compared to that of VISA. Despite providing a global network, there is the problem of scalability. So how can this issue be tackled? Komodo, a crypto project ranked at 55 on CoinMarketCap at the time of writing, has come up with its own unique framework to handle this problem.

Instead of using a single chain for carrying the brunt of all the transactions on the network, Komodo employs parallel blockchains, each dedicated to a specific operation.

In order to get a technical insight into the project, BlockPublisher got in touch with James Lee, the founder and core developer of the project. Komodo employs the delayed proof-of-work (dPoW) algorithm at its core. Talking about the current TPS of the main blockchain of the KMD ecosystem and the issue of scalability, James stated:

James: “Currently 100 [TPS], after sapling update would be 200. But our scaling doesn’t depend on a single chain, that is like relying on a single road to handle all your traffic.”

He further added:

James: “It is also possible to create a cluster of chains where coins are fungible between any chain in the cluster using this, it is like building more roads to get more capacity…You can easily create a new chain using the runtime fork capability, a new chain can be part of a cluster.”

Regarding the possibility of using sharding for increasing the scalability even further, James stated:

James: “Sharding is needed if there is just a single chain with all transactions. With KMD, the design is that each chain handles the transactions of interest, it sort of automatically segregates the traffic, so what point is there for sharding? Sharding weakens the security and it also creates all sorts of complex issues that need to be properly solved. is there even a working solution for sharding yet? Our solution takes advantage that independent blockchains are independent.”

With dedicated blockchains handling specific operations, it becomes easier for KMD to expand its overall transaction handling.

James: “There is a KMDICE chain that does the dice betting and it was doing lots of transactions, but it didnt affect any other chain. So people that don’t care for the dice, don’t need to load any of its transactions. There is no need to shard away transactions, etc.

Scaling is solved by not creating the bottleneck on a single chain in the first place. Having a single chain that needs to have all transactions is a design that just can’t scale. Its own success will lead to its failure. The more popular it gets, the more bogged down, expensive and bloated it becomes.”

Finally summing up the benefits offered by KMD, James stated:

We are not trying to lock people into using any specific chain. [We are] not trying to overcharge people for just making a tx. In open source, if the cost becomes too expensive, it is just forked. As we see with many companies just forking ETH, instead of using the ETH itself.

With KMD, it is designed to be the security engine for all the other chains and also allows the cross chain capability. The cost is low enough that it can essentially be ignored, and thus be a viable solution for cost sensitive projects to use.

As the market saturates, it is likely that only those projects will survive which present forward a viable use-case of this revolutionary technology with an efficient and faster implementation. With this unique employment of the blockchains dedicated for specific purposes, Komodo (KMD) is certainly one project to look out for in the long run.