Bitcoin and similar blockchain systems have a problem, and renowned MIT cryptographer Silvio Micali says he has a solution.

To make blockchains scale, says Micali, the networks will need to adopt a new approach to establishing agreement that the information in the ledger is true. Agreements in current blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum require a resource-intensive process called proof of work, by which computers on the network, called “miners,” prove that they are not malicious actors trying to corrupt the ledger (see “What is a blockchain?”). Miners must spend lots of energy to win a chance to add new entries, or blocks, to the chain, earning cryptocurrency as a reward. Though an effective way for a network to come to agreement that the information in the ledger is valid, this consumes large amounts of energy and is relatively slow.

Micali—who won the Turing Award in 2012 for his pioneering work in cryptography, including a number of techniques that are used to secure blockchain systems—shared his vision for a new system, called Algorand, on stage at MIT Technology Review’s Business of Blockchain conference. The system uses a novel approach called proof of stake, in which responsibility for validating new transactions is allocated to users according to how much money they have in the system.