DTR and Academics Tackle Faster, Scalable Cryptocurrency
A group of professors from universities including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley are at work on the Unit-e, a “globally scalable” cryptocurrency that can achieve blazing speeds and retain Bitcoin’s vaunted decentralization. Unit-e will be the first project of the non-profit Distributed Technologies Research (DTR), an academic-formed foundation supported by hedge fund Pantera Capital Management. They hope to design a coin that will process transactions faster than Visa.
Bloomberg reports that, although Bitcoin “has built a following among developers, anarchists and speculators, mainstream adoption remains elusive,” in part, said DTR, because “inbuilt restrictions have constrained its performance and scalability and, as a result, reduced its usefulness as an everyday unit of payment.”
“The mainstream public is aware that these networks don’t scale,’’ said Pantera Capital co-chief investment officer Joey Krug, who is also a DTR council member. “We are on the cusp of something where if this doesn’t scale relatively soon, it may be relegated to ideas that were nice but didn’t work in practice: more like 3D printing than the Internet.’’
Unit-e is slated to launch in the second half of 2019, with the target of processing “as many as 10,000 transactions per second.” That compares with Bitcoin’s current average of 3.3 to 7 transactions per second, and Ethereum’s 10 to 30 transactions per second. Visa, on average, processes about 1,700 transactions per second.
See the full story here; http://www.etcentric.org/dtr-and-academics-tackle-faster-scalable-cryptocurrency/