Bitcoin may be the king of crypto, but it’s technology is often considered too slow to compete with the likes of Tron and Ethereum. That’s why a company called Conflux is working to speed it up.

Some of Bitcoin’s Weaknesses

The venture recently announced the end of a $35 million funding round led predominantly by Sequoia China and assorted Chinese internet companies. Conflux claims it can overcome a key limitation in Bitcoin’s existing technology that only permits it to add one block to a chain at a time. Should Bitcoin add an additional block along with another, this ultimately leads to a fork, creating an entirely new and separate chain.

Conflux says it is has developed a new system that overcomes this by permitting parties to potentially work on blocks side-by-side and add them to the chain concurrently. This allows for further decentralization and prevents any single party from controlling the blockchain.

Who’s in Charge?

The project is being led by Fan Long – a professor at the University of Toronto – and Andrew Yao – a Turing Award recipient affectionately referred to as China’s “godfather of computer science.”

Long comments:

Conflux’s main idea is how to make the whole blockchain scalable. We’ve changed the structure of the blockchain so that it’s no longer a chain in the sense that it records each block based on what its parent block says.

Some of the Top Tech Stuff

In addition, he says that Bitcoin’s speeds will soon be able to compete with those of Ethereum, and potentially enable smart contracts to occur via the Bitcoin blockchain.

Conflux described some of the other technical features of their project in a press release which reads:

Contrary to popular belief, true decentralization isn’t sacrificed to increase throughput, highlighting Conflux as the first example that achieves the best of both worlds. By weaving a Directed Acylic Graph data structure into Conflux’s Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm, tests on its testnet have achieved a throughput of at least 6,500 transactions per second (TPS) while supporting at least 20,000 nodes.

What Will Happen Later?

Conflux also claims that some of China’s primary internet companies are building decentralized apps (DApps) to run on its new network. DApps have often failed to garner serious audiences, though this can likely be attributed to the scalability issues associated with Bitcoin’s blockchain. Long states that smart contracts are about to become much more important in the crypto space and will serve as some of the biggest and best tools in both the insurance and finance industries.

Can Conflux really make Bitcoin faster? Post your comments below.

Images courtesy of ShutterStock