There are way too many smart contract platforms, where some are copycats and others are infeasible. It’s safe to say that the blockchain market is oversaturated. Still, there is room for a high TPS platform to take over Ethereum’s and Neo’s market share. We’ve all seen that the Ethereum network can barely handle a kitties game or two popular ICO’s happening at the same time. If it’s a busy trading day, Ethereum gas fees are through the roof. IDEX is built on the Ethereum blockchain and it’s incredibly slow despite months of optimization. Right now there are four ways to innovate the public blockchain space: side-chains, modifications to consensus algorithm, sharding, and innovation in ledger structure. Vite primarily falls in the last category.

One of the advantages of DAG is the block lattice structure which is inherently faster than traditional blockchains. However, DAG comes with security deficiencies. Vite addresses them with something called the snapshot chain, which is an additional blockchain that takes a snapshot of the most recent transaction of every individual account, gathers them together in a block, and pushes it onto the snapshot chain. Whenever a block in the account blockchain is tampered with, the corresponding block in the snapshot chain also needs to be changed. Over time as the snapshot chain becomes longer and longer, it becomes too costly to tamper with.

They also use a novel HDPoS consensus algorithm, which is two levels of consensus at the account blockchain level and the snapshot chain level. This consensus mechanism allows for low latency and high scalability. Vite is developing their own language, Solidity++, which is highly compatible with Ethereum’s Solidity language. This should allow for seamless transition for current Ethereum DApp developers.

Overall, Vite plans to solve the problems of security, scalability, throughput, and latency. They plan on doing so with their HDPoS consensus, snapshot chain, and asynchronous architecture. Think of Vite as a more secure Nano with smart contract capabilities. For more information on the tech side, give a read through their whitepaper or take a look at a more technical article.

I lean more on investment potential than tech, so let’s transition to Vite’s selling points and “pumpamentals”. I’ve made massive returns on multiple micro-cap coins during this bear market (check out my earlier article for more info). Vite shares similarities with projects that I’ve seen grow 200–500% in a bear market. Many of those were a flash in the pan and have nowhere near the same value potential that Vite has.

Some micro-caps I had success with. Is Vite next?

First taking a look at the founding team, Charles Liu was the co-founder of a Bitcoin exchange called Coinport. By all accounts this was a pretty popular Chinese exchange before China shut down Bitcoin trading exchanges. The COO, Richard Yan, has a lot of experience working for Goldman Sachs and Two Sigma. Many members of the team have worked at Google and come from some of the top schools in the world such as Tsinghua and Harvard.

Their investors are probably the most impressive part of the project. Bitmain is currently valued at $12 billion and they’re backing this project. Bitmain very rarely invests in ICO projects (Nuls is one) so Vite must have stood out significantly for them to pull the trigger. Node Capital’s track record is impressive with investments in Zilliqa, Fcoin, Huobi and IOST (all top 100 projects). They’re partnered with OK Blockchain Capital and have recently been listed on OKEX. Safe to say, Vite’s team is well-connected to top exchanges and I expect them to be listed on more in the future. Lastly, they’re partnered with an highly regarded project called Loopring.

When looking at competitors, the first thing to realize is that the DAG + smart contract space is not crowded. A few competitors jump to mind: IOTA, Byteball, Constellation, and Fantom. None of these have the security offered by the snapshot chain and many of them have way higher market caps than Vite. This makes Vite a more attractive value proposition.

When I first heard about the project, searches with the $vite tag on Twitter yielded very few results. Barely anybody was talking about it besides the ICO group I was in. Recently, I’ve been seeing it more on message-boards and popular western sites. The team is currently running a very extensive community outreach program with contests and airdrops. When something is undervalued it doesn’t stay that way for long.

In the long-term, I see Vite as one of the contenders to garner large-scale, industrial adoption in the public blockchain space.