Crypto Diaries: Reviewing Major blockchain developments & Upgrades

IOTA’s Coordicide, TRON’s BTFS, Polkadot Protocol, Utility Settlement Coin (USC) & Upgrades in Monero, Neo & Tezos

Crypto Markets have gone into corrective mode ever since Bitcoin hit the high of $9K on May 30th. The Short term bias has turned bearish after showing signs of exhaustion with a two-month bull run behind it. The immediate downward trend is set to continue but downside should be contained above the $6800-$7000 support zone.

On the top side, an $8000–8200 resistance zone needs to be pierced convincingly to start a new up-leg. BTC dominance stands at 55.3% with a total market cap of $250 billion at the time of writing. Moving on to the next order of the day are some of the recent noteworthy developments in Cryptoverse.

IOTA’s Coordicide

Cryptocurrency Projects like EOS, TRON & NEO have repeatedly been criticized for being highly centralized networks with a very small number of block producers controlling the network. In fact, NEO -> 7, EOS -> 21, TRON -> 26 & Lisk (LSK) with 100 block producers and/or delegates secure the respective networks. Acting on these concerns, the IOTA foundation has recently taken the next step towards the upgrade of the IOTA protocol.

Dubbed as Coodicide, it is a move towards a more decentralized, permissionless & scalable DLT. This scalable & Lightweight solution provides transaction confirmations within seconds without relying on external entities. Open source technology provides a layered approach where extensions can be applied through additional modules.

No Fee data & value transactions would enable micropayments which are so vital to the adoption of Cryptocurrencies. In short, Coordicide solves the three basic blockchain problems of high fees, scaling, and centralization.

TRON’s BTFS

The dApps platform & self-proclaimed challenger to Ethereum has been in the news for the past many months. The much-anticipated Tron Odyssey 3.5 hard fork & the issuance of its native cryptocurrency called BitTorrent Token (BTT) have been the bright spots for the project this year.

Tron’s TRC 20 token protocol has gotten some traction lately as a replacement for Ethereum’s popular ERC 20 standard for issuance of new tokens. The biggest approval of the TRC 20 standard came in the shape of Tether (World’s largest stable coin) deciding to issue a new version of its stable coin on the Tron blockchain.

Now Tron plans to develop a BitTorrent-based version of decentralized file system InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). The new open-sourced protocol will be called BitTorrent File System (BTFS). BTFS claims to be both a protocol and network implementation that provides a content-addressable, peer-to-peer mechanism for storing and sharing digital content in a decentralized file system.

Polkadot Protocol

This could easily be considered the Next-gen in blockchain innovation. Polka dot Protocol — is an open-source “para chain (parallelized chains)” framework that provides scalable & seamless interoperability between different networks. Ethereum co-founder Dr. Gavin Wood is the brains behind the network which is based in Switzerland.

The main aim of the project is to address scalability, interoperability, developability and governance issues. Polka dot intends to create a decentralized economic hub where data of blockchains, applications, and money could be shared — Visualize a multi-chain future where all networks are communicating in a secure, scalable & decentralized fashion.

According to their official blog, over 25 projects have stated their intention to connect to their blockchains of the total 100 para chains support at the launch of version 1 of the protocol, sometimes in Q3 2019. Hierarchical scaling — a feature where a relay chain connects to another relay chain providing infinite scalability would be available with the launch of version 2 of Polka dot sometimes in 2020. Huge interest in the pre-sale of polka dot tokens put its valuation at $1.2 billion, shows investors' faith in the solution the project presents. Certainly, something to look forward to…

Credit: Polka dot White paper

Utility Settlement Coin (USC)

This ambitious project, four years in the making recently announced the creation of a new company called Fnality with the closure of a £50 million ($63.2 million) Series A financing round. The company was founded by a group of big banks from North America, Europe & Japan who are backing the project — Banco Santander, BNY Mellon, Barclays, CIBC, Commerzbank, Credit Suisse, ING, KBC Group, Lloyds Banking Group, MUFG Bank, Nasdaq, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, State Street Corporation and UBS.

The USC token that is expected to be fully operational within the next 12 months (pending regulatory approval), intends to create an efficient system of cross-border payments, payments for tokenized security markets & reduce systemic risks in the trade settlement processes. USC will be backed by cash assets of the Central banks & will initially support five fiat currencies — CAD, EUR, GBP, JPY, and USD. I wonder how JPM Coin is going to hold up against this collaborative effort?

Upgrades

Privacy-focused coin Monero has been under consistent threats from malware attacks in recent months, where malicious players have been mining the XMR coin. Monero now plans to switch to a new proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm in October. The current CryptoNight algorithm, which is hard-forked every 6 months to ensure ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) resistance will be replaced by RandomX algorithm if the audit preceding that is successful. The regular hard-forking which was criticized for being too centralized would be replaced by RandomX process which requires far less developer intervention to stay ASIC-resistant.

has been under consistent threats from malware attacks in recent months, where malicious players have been mining the XMR coin. Monero now plans to switch to a new proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm in October. The current algorithm, which is hard-forked every 6 months to ensure ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) resistance will be replaced by algorithm if the audit preceding that is successful. The regular hard-forking which was criticized for being too centralized would be replaced by RandomX process which requires far less developer intervention to stay ASIC-resistant. Neo is upgrading to neo-cli v2.10.2 with the optimized dBFT 2.0 consensus algorithm — biggest change being the addition of an oversize fee for transactions above 1024 bytes. For higher priority transactions that exceed this limit, a fee (in the cryptocurrency GAS) would be charged according to the following formula: transaction size * 0.00001 GAS + 0.001 GAS . The main purpose of adding the fee is to protect the networks from malicious attacks.

is upgrading to neo-cli v2.10.2 with the optimized dBFT 2.0 consensus algorithm — biggest change being the addition of an oversize fee for transactions above 1024 bytes. For higher priority transactions that exceed this limit, a fee (in the cryptocurrency GAS) would be charged according to the following formula: . The main purpose of adding the fee is to protect the networks from malicious attacks. And finally, the Tezos blockchain has incorporated two backward-compatible changes in the network. First is the requirement of tokens needed to become a baker (equivalent to miners on a PoW blockchain) dropping from 10,000 XTZ to 8,000. The increase would provide for higher participation & better governance of the network. The second upgrade increases the block size for processing larger transactions.

Time to sign off folks… stay tuned for the next edition.

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