At VideoCoin, we are building a native blockchain that is suitable for streaming video applications. While the video itself is not stored on the VideoCoin blockchain, all transactions, proofs and supporting events are recorded on the blockchain providing a protocol ledger that enables decentralized video infrastructure.

As we built out our blockchain, we faced two main challenges:

Race Conditions

Simply put, a race condition in a protocol is a situation where the behavior of a protocol becomes unpredictable depending on the timing of an event. Race conditions cause very complex bugs in software systems.

Our first implementation of the VideoCoin Blockchain was based on a five-second block time, where every transaction waited up to five-seconds to get written on the blockchain.

While five-seconds seems to be a small duration, when you’re live streaming video, it can become a big problem. In a live stream, video chunks are generated every few seconds and if a transaction waits for a block to be mined and confirmed, the workers will have to wait on a semaphore to write transactions even though they have finished processing.

This creates a lot of complex waiting cycles in our protocol.

Transaction Throughput

The number of transactions that can be written into the blockchain for every second becomes a blocking factor when you have multiple streams writing into the blockchain at the same time.

Especially in VideoCoin, we have multiple distributed operators on the network, whose every action in the protocol triggers and event or a transaction that gets recorded on the blockchain.

Our previous implementation with a five-second block time was a limiting factor again because transactions were not able to make to the blockchain unless all events in the protocol chain resolved their wait conditions.

In order to resolve these two massive problems, we are happy to announce the following enhancements to the VideoCoin Blockchain

Instant Finality

After a lot of work, we successfully removed the five-second block wait time and we can now accept transactions into the blockchain as soon as it is submitted.

This makes race conditions a very rare condition. All transactions are mined as soon as they are submitted.

10x Performance Boost for Stream Creations

Since transactions are mined instantly on the blockchain, we can now create streams up to ten times faster and mine the related transactions instantaneously.

These are just the beginning of our planned enhancements for our native blockchain.

As we March towards K2, we are expecting to make EVM enhancements, Proof-of-Stake implementations, and many others to come!

Stay tuned!