Russian blockchain specialists have met to discuss unresolved technological blockchain problems as well as one of the proposed solutions for them – Lightning Networks.

The organisation of the meetup was supported by Future FinTech accelerator. The list of speakers included Aleksandr Chepurnoy (IOHK, Scorex, Permacoin), Dmitry Meshkov (IOHK, Scorex, Permacoin) and Aleksandr Pankov (Qiwi).

While discussing the unsettled problems of the blockchain technology, Aleksandr Chepurnoy focused on several most important issues: more efficient consensus mechanisms, network scalability, anonymity issues as well as blockchain use cases on the level of applications. Consensus mechanism used in the bitcoin system – proof-of-work – is known to be highly inefficient in terms of the network’s capacity. Its most distinguished alternative is the proof-of-stake mechanism; for instance, Ethereum team is planning to switch their platform to this type soon. Chepurnoy told about one more consensus type that, according to him, “for a long time existed only on paper and nobody even tried to realise it in practice” before it was implemented by his team Permacoin at a Moscow hackathon. This consensus scheme is based on the idea that there is no need to keep the complete history of transactions on all miners’ computers in the network; instead, the history should be stored in a decentralised manner. A miner will enjoy a right to generate new blocks once he presents a proof of retrievability of the system’s dataset. Chepurnoy also remarked that there is a certain necessity to explore how application developers can build particular projects on blockchain-code. In other words, he pointed to the lack of understanding of the blockchain’s role as "a software connector”.

Aleksandr Panov, a blockchain developer from Qiwi, explained the principles of the Lightning Network functionality, which were first presented at a meeting of Ethereum developers and Coinbase representatives in March 2016. Pankov stated that the Lightning approach has a real potential to solve the problem of block size since it completely differs from all the solutions proposed before that proved incapable of improving the network’s scalability and increasing its throughput. According to him, the aim of the Lightning project is to implement linear scalability, which will allow increasing the system’s throughput for any necessary number of transactions.

The organisers expect to hold such meetups for developers on a regular basis once a month.

Anna Lavinskaya