Thunder Token team aims to create a blockchain network which is fast, scalable, secure and compatible. The technological idea of the project is innovative in comparison to other projects. More importantly, the core team have great academic achievement and amazing experience in technology and blockchain.

Technological ideas

Thunder Token team aims to create a blockchain network which is fast, scalable, secure and compatible. The most outstanding feature of the network is the consensus protocol called Thunderella. Thunder Token wants to achieve State machine replication while creating Thunderella. Thunderella includes ‘fast path’ which runs on top of a standard blockchain called ‘slow chain’. In the fast path, there are different committees and one leader in each committee. The leader will be elected by running a random oracle. In case the majority of the committee is honest and online, transactions (with an increasing sequence number) will be submitted to the leader to be signed. After that, the transactions will be sent to other committee members for signing. A transaction is notarized when it receives more than ¾ of the committee signatures.

In case a transaction is not confirmed, it will be sent to the underlying slow chain. When the number of unnotarized transactions in slow chain forms a certain number of blocks called k blocks but the leader has not confirmed them in the fast path, the network will enter a cool-down period in which all activities in the fast path are stopped and all committee members have to broadcast all notarized and unnotarized transactions they have seen to other members and the underlying blockchain. The leader will be switched out and the verification process will continue in the underlying blockchain. Or else the committee can choose another leader and turn to the operation of fast path. However, if the leader can handle before k blocks are formed, the system will return to fast mode.

State machine replication is a distributed system for implementing fault tolerance services. Services could be replicated on multiple servers so even when there is failure with one or more servers, services are available. State machine replication is used by Google, Microsoft and many Silicon technology companies.

In such a consensus protocol, even when the leader or committee members are corrupted, other honest members are not likely to be influenced. Honest members can report the problem to the underlying blockchain and the whole committee when their transactions are not confirmed. The operation of the whole network still continues even when leaders or some committee members are unavailable or cheating.

Although the feature of scalability of the blockchain is introduced in the website, it is not highlighted in the technical paper. Instead, Thunder Token focuses much on the consistency and liveness of the network. The liveness means that whenever a client submits a transaction, transaction must be incorporated in every honest node.

Team

- Chris Wang (Co-founder, CEO): He graduated from with a B.A in Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley at age 19. At age 22, he got a Ph.D in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Two years later, he co-founded Playdom, an online social network game developer popular on Facebook, Google+ and MySpace. Playdom grew to over 500 employees, 20 million monthly active users and over 100 million annual revenue. On July 27, 2010, The Walt Disney Company acquired Playdom in a $763 million deal. He is an early investor in Alibaba, Glassdoor (a jobs and recruiting website) and FlipKart (India’s biggest online store). According to a Forbes’ article, Chris Wang bought into Alibaba for just $6.75 per share in 2011. In 2014, the figure increased to $68 per share in the company’s IPO and now the figure is $169. In 2013, when Chris Wang invested in Flipkart, the company raised $1.4 billion and bought by Ebay India.

- Elaine Shi (Scientist): She got a Ph.D in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. She is also Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University; and co-founder and co-director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrency and Contracts (IC3). IC3 is an initiative of faculty members at Cornell University, Cornell Tech, UC Berkeley, UIUC and the Technion. IC3 faculty is the recipient of a $3M 3-year National Science Foundation grant awarded in 2015. She has received a series of awards including Packard Fellowship (2015), ONR YIP Award (2016), NSF Career Award, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and Google Faculty Awards (2013, 2014), NSA Best Scientific Cybersecurity Award (2013), an ASPLOS Best Paper Award (2015). Generally, those awards aim to honor scientists, researchers and engineers for their research or contribution to the development of any technology. Elaine Shi wrote the first academic research paper on both Bitcoin and decentralized smart contracts, first to teach smart contract programming. Information about her awards can be found on websites and documents of those awards.

- Chris Li (Engineering Lead): He was Linux kernel hacker, Linux sparse checker maintainer on kernel.org . Linux supports the creation of sustainable open source ecosystems by providing financial and intellectual resources, infrastructure, services, events, and training. He is an expert on kernel, file systems, high performance systems, virtual machines and hypervisors. He is also CTO of hover camera. There is no picture of this guy in the website. The information about Linux is available. However, there is not much information referring the relation between Linux and Chris Li. Also, the detail that Chris Li is CTO of hover camera is not clear and difficult to confirm.

- Rafael Pass (Scientist): He earned a Ph.D of Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and Cornell Tech. The information is available in the website of Cornell University. He is also the co-creator of ANONIZE, a Large-Scale Anonymous Survey System based on a new cryptographic technology. Additionally, R. Pass received the NSF Career Award, the AFOSR Young Investigator Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Microsoft Faculty Award, Wallenberg Academy Award and a Google Faculty award. Information about Rafael Pass’s awards is easy to find and published in the website of Cornell University or other Institutes.

There are only four people in the team. The team needs to expand its size. That is why Thunder Token posted recruitment news in its website in quest of tenacious engineers, product managers, and others who are committed to creating a high-performance blockchain. Apart from Chris Li whose identification seems to be mysterious, profiles of other members are really clear and it is easy to confirm the information about them. They have great academic achievement and amazing experience in technology and blockchain.

Community

- Twitter: 2,888

Coindesk It can be noticed that from November 2017, there was an article about Thunder Token project in. Thunder Token can also be found in several ICO websites such as ICOgens, ICOdrops, Cryptodiffer or Cyptona. However, maybe Thunder team has not started their marketing strategy so the number of Telegram social group is low. Moreover, in the Telegram group chat, we can only join and see the message from admins without the ability to ask or interact.

Roadmap

Roadmap has not been released. It is stated in the website that Testnet is arriving in June.

Summary

Advantages

The most outstanding advantage of Thunder Token is a core team with formal education in the field of technology in general and blockchain in particular. Although they are really young, they have achieved amazing academic results. Especially, apart from expertise in technology and blockchain, the CEO seems to have great business vision because his investment in Abibaba, Glassdoor or Flipkart brought him extremely high profit.

The technological idea of the project is innovative in comparison to other projects. For example, their Sleepy Model of consensus which allows the network to operate normally even when there are several nodes offline. The parallel structure in which the protocol runs on top of structure helps to increase the security and consistency of the network.

The team has held and attended several conferences and meetups which help to introduce the project to investors and the community.

Things to note

Technical papers of the project are too long and complicated for the public to understand. It would be better if they express more simply and briefly the most impressive features of their blockchain in the website so that everyone can what they are able to do. Or else only technology experts or who have great background knowledge about technology and blockchain can be patient and knowledgeable enough to read through all technical papers and understand the technology properly.

Although the team has not published any information except for technology, it is rumored that there is no ICO. Even if that information is true, it is still beneficial for the team to build its own community both online and offline. It can receive support and feedback from the public about its technology to continue developing the project. The team should recruit someone for marketing strategies and operation.

Even if there is no ICO for this project, it is exciting to wait for more details about the project and see what the team can actually do.

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You are reading [ICO REVIEW] THUNDER TOKEN: Blockchain’s solutions for scalability, consistency and liveness from the section ARTICLES.

Source: icogens.com