#MetaHash is set to launch its mainnet on June 29. The proprietary blockchain plans to tackle the key challenge of scalability.
Blockchain is both praised and criticized – hailed as a cure-all for transparency issues, supply chain logistics and cross-border settlements. It’s a seemingly transformative technology that is slowly entering our everyday lexicon as it touches on almost every conceivable business practice that involves records, verifications, payments, agreements and shipments.
Even as the technology continues to expand from the crypto community to big institutions, opponents point out that it’s too slow to manage large volumes of transactions. But the tech is relatively new, first advanced by Bitcoin’s inception in 2009. Since its growth, developers and organizations, such as The Ethereum Foundation, have started focusing on scaling solutions in order to make mainstream adoption and roadmap visions a reality.
#MetaHash is working to advance new technology its team believes is distinctly unique. The architecture is complex, running two blockchains in tandem – a transaction net and a technical net. It relies on cryptographic evidence, multivote-Proof-of-Stake and variable nodes, where the network selects a function for each node in order to achieve high speeds.
This framework fundamentally differs from Ethereum.
The key difference between Ethereum and #MetaHash lies in #MetaHash’s dual-chain data collection, which allows for dynamic reallocation of processing resources as opposed to the static full nodes and light nodes framework of Ethereum.
It also differs from EOS. Whereas EOS uses delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPOS) to achieve high-speeds (which centralizes block producers to a select few nodes), #MetaHash remains fully decentralized through multivote-Proof-of-Stake (multiPOS) whereby at least 67% of nodes vote, with each node getting one vote for each of the roles it has played.
“We concentrated on the main reason why blockchains are slow and we took a very different approach to building blockchains. You can still hold a blockchain’s history and everyone can see it, but we really compress the data,” said Gleb Nikitin, co-founder of #MetaHash. “So when a user sends a transaction, we check the data to see which transaction is up to date. If an end user wants to check it, he can do it in an unlinear way. He can download the micro blocks that he needs. Before a block is verified, all of the nodes have to approve the transaction. And we can use a wide variety of means to check the cryptographic evidence to make sure the data is true. And it can be checked in a fast way.”
The framework has an organic adaptability, allowing nodes to change function, depending on the environment.
“There’s a distinction – torrent nodes versus master and slave nodes. Although all the nodes run the same software, the network will try to assign the best nodes for a certain task – and not all the nodes. Also, a node can become many nodes, and it can change roles multiple times in a day.”
This design parallels a software engineering framework used by today’s tech behemoths Google, Amazon, Uber and others. Dubbed ‘microservices-oriented architecture,’ it allows large distributed systems to establish a network of ‘microservices’ – small applications focused on more specific, simple functions that work together to accomplish complex tasks. Massive companies can then deliver high availability and throughput by scaling each small, specific microservice independently, without needing to coordinate the rest of the system. The entire system can then adapt to whatever throughput it needs, much like #MetaHash’s network learns how to optimize each type of node to meet and manage transaction throughput and DApp requests.
#MetaHash will be open to DApp developers in October when it plans to start building out the network.
Moving forward, each of the various consensus protocols – multivote POS versus delegated POS – along with the different node architecture types, will be tested. Ultimately they’ll produce hard results on speed, security and a network’s ability to maintain its status as a decentralized blockchain.
Meanwhile, blockchain developers will need to prove that their products and scaling solutions can truly perform in real-world scenarios, delivering on promises and claims that blockchain is the most defining and transformative technology since the internet.