Blink is introduced a decentralized non-delegated proof-of-stake consensus algorithm that provides massive scalability support under standard distributed ledger use cases, while also providing almost-certainty of a transaction being approved by the network in just several seconds.

1. General Information



Website: https://blink.network/

Token Metrics:

Token supply: about 1 billion token (under discussion)

Hardcap : TBA

Softcap : TBA

Token distribution: TBA

Communities

Telegram discuss group: 167 members

Telegram channel: 140 subscribes

Medium: Click here

Github: Click here

2. What is Blink?

Blink is a protocol that solves the problem of maintaining a distributed ledger. It is an alternative to the blockchain technology itself, not just a cryptocurrency. Specificly , Blink is the coin, Blitz is the protocol. It maintains the same levels of security and decentralisation, while improving the speed and decreasing latency. Blink is built on Ethereum blockchain using Proof of Stake; hence, there are no mining. But one who runs a full node will be rewarded with Blink token.

3. Technology

Blink protocol: The Blink protocol’s aim is to create a cryptocurrency which can be used for real life payments, microtransactions and a platform for smart contracts that can enable mass adoption of distributed applications.

Independent transaction:

One of the most important characteristics of Blink is no need to force the entire system to agree on blocks of transactions. Blink allows independent operations to be applied to the state in any order, with the condition that the resulting end state is the same. In the Blink architecture, each account has an independent chain of transactions that are applied to it; hence, a global consensus is not needed. It just needs a consensus on the accounts modified by individual transactions. All transactions are also cryptographically signed with the previous state of the modified accounts. This is the same principle of security increasing with each transaction that happens with blockchains, but applied per account, allowing parallelization and scalability.

Locker

Unlike Bitcoin and many other blockchain based currencies requiring computational power to solve the cryptographic puzzles, Blink uses proof of stake to choose the supervisor node called the locker, responsible for maintaining an order of transactions for that account. Each node in the network should prove it owns or is endorsed by one or more accounts. The sum of account balances represents that node’s total balance. Besides, each node should also have a subset of its accounts that represent its collatera and will be punished if they misbehave. When a locker is punished, funds are taken from his stake account, and redistributed to all other nodes. The punishment amount for a locker misbehaviour will be recommended at least the income that the node would make in a period of 30 days but would be best estimated from a working network.

Rounds

Having a locker associated with each account adds another layer of security, but if the association is permanent it can backfire and cause several problems. To address these issues, they divide the timeline into intervals called rounds, each lasting between 3 and 60 seconds. In the beginning of each round, each account will be paired with a different locker using the pseudorandom procedure described in the next section. This pairing is implicit, and can be calculated only when required.

How the consensus is reached?

The consensus component of Blink is constantly running in parallel to transaction broadcasting. For each round it consists of 2 phases:

Proposal & sync . This phase starts right at the end of a round . Its purpose is for any node to find out about transactions that were accepted by the majority of the network, but they were missed by the node in the broadcasting phase.

Commitment . This is the finality of the consensus routine. Each node makes a single commitment on what the global state at the end of the round is.

Initially, only two lockers (for the two affected accounts) accept and sign the transaction. So the initial confirmation of a transaction comes after 300–600 milliseconds. Having high throughput (20 000 transactions per second) means transaction fees will be low..

After a transaction is initially signed by two nodes, it is gossiped through the network as the nodes sync up. The more time passes, the higher the percentage of nodes that receive and apply a past transaction. After a certain amount of time, the network votes on the entire state some time in the past. A transaction that managed to reach a majority of the nodes will be included in the vote, thus reaching finality. In the current prototype implementation, this happens in less than 5 seconds.

4. Usefulness

Security:

Each transaction also needs to be signed by the lockers of all accounts involved, which increases the security for transactions. Besides, the way Blink selects the locker for an account is based on a proof-of-stake type selection. Since locker selection is independent for each account, it makes any attack on the global state impossible. Furthermore, having rounds and enforcing that every transaction needs to be assigned to a round give users another powerful layer of security. It can guarantee the same level of security as blockchain algorithms.

Latency Reduction

By considering a function that consistently chooses only a subset of lockers for a specific account, Blink could allow transactions within the same city for instance to be signed by lockers in the order of milliseconds. However, there would be a disadvantage that an account might get trapped with a small set of lockers that are malicious. Hence, it should be considered with care.

5. Testnet Performance

They already have implemented a prototype of the Blitz protocol and a working alpha of a wallet, they’ve reached speeds of over 30000 transactions per second on a local network and 15000 transaction on a global network, but they expect to improve these numbers in the next 2-3 months. The main net will be released within 3 to 6 months from now.

6. Team

Mihai Ciucu:

CEO & co-founder.

Before Blink, Mihai was CEO of CS Academy, a computer science educational platform which he co-founded in 2015. He also worked as freelance AI consultant. Work experience also includes back-end software development for Full Tilt Poker, the second largest online poker platform in the world.

Andrei:

COO & co-founder.

A Forbes Romania 30 under 30 winner and ex-Googler, Andrei also has a vast experience with algorithms and data structures. He is an International Olympiad in Informatics silver medalist.

Alexandru Velea:

Software Engineer.

He is an ex-Google site reliability engineer. Since an early age he has developed an interest in algorithmic puzzles, his passion leading him to win two medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics. As a student, he has qualified at the ACM-ICPC World Finals twice.

Alexandru Murtaza:

Software Engineer.

A core member of the team, being in charge of the backend development at Blink. He’s an ex-Google and ex-Intel engineer passionate about cryptocurrencies since 2015.

Mihai Gheorghe:

Machine Learning Engineer.

Mihai’s main interests are Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. After working at Google in the Calendar team, he used his machine learning skills at Facebook in the Ads team.

Darius Marian:

Software Engineer.

Darius is the most prolific when it comes to programming competitions, winning 10 medals, 6 of which were gold. Now he is a reliable member of the team, working as a full stack developer.

Denis Mita:

UI/UX & Front-End Developer.

His past experience involves working at Google on Google Flights and Google Cloud.

Vlad Tarniceru:

Design & Front-End Developer.

Vlad is Blink’s lead designer, but he also has experience as a software developer. Vlad has been a member of the crypto community for years. His interest in computer science started at an early age, when he won his first medal at an international competition at the age of 13.

7. Partner: Not yet

8. Roadmap : Blink Team haven’t showed their official roadmap on the website; however, in the whitepaper, they mention their intentions and plans in the future.

9. Compared with other projects

Bitcoin Ethereum Ripple IOTA Blink Low transaction fees No No Yes Yes Yes Smart contract No Yes No No Yes No proof of work No No Yes No Yes Fully decentralized Yes Yes No Yes Yes Confirmation time 10m+ 2m+ 4s 1m+ 1s

From the table, we can see that in comparison with other projects, Blink protocol is an environment- friendly solution when using proof of stake and smart contract to maintain very fast confirmation time and decentralization with low transaction fees.

10. Verdict

Blink showed and analyzed their technology very clearly and understandably. In terms of technology, Blink has a good idea about a new consensus protocol that does not use blockchain maintaining high throughput, low latency while staying fully decentralised and secure. So far they've implemented a prototype and the results look really promising: 20k transaction per second on a global network. It solves a very real problem for crypto that wants to be a global payment system. About Blink team, in terms of achievements, they won 13 gold, 18 silver and 6 bronze medals in international olympiads in informatics, over a period that spans 10 years. it is really expressed. Also with the experience of working at industry-leading software companies, they are believed to make the advanced consensus protocol successful and implement it to the highest performance and security standards. However, there is a lot of important information about token metrics, roadmap, and partners not released yet. Therefore, it is necessary to wait for more detail before making our own decisions.

Rate from Icogens.com:

HYPE RISK ROI TERM ICOGENS ' SCORE LOW MEDIUM NOT RATE SHORT NORMAL

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You are reading [ICO REVIEW] What is Blink? Providing massive scalability and low latency while maintaining security and decentralization?, from the section ARTICLES.

Source: Icogens.com