10,000 TPS for Unit-e? American Professors Developing Cryptocurrency
January 18, 2019 by William Peaster
Last year, a team of American professors joined forces to create a non-profit foundation called Distributed Technology Research (DTR). The group’s now declared their first project as Unit-e, a cryptocurrency that will reportedly process around 10,000 transactions per second.
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Unit-e Aimed at Scaling in the Here and Now
Under the DTR’s mantle, professors from seven American higher-education institutions are creating Unit-e, a new scaling-minded cryptocurrency the group will launch later this year.
The digital currency’s blockchain will reportedly be extremely efficient, as its builders say it will be able to process in the ballpark of 10,000 transactions per second.
The team is looking to best the TPS capabilities of Bitcoin and Ethereum, which presently and respectively handle throughput of up to seven and 30 transactions per second. Even the fiat-based Visa payments network boasts less than 2,000 TPS.
Comprised of academics from top U.S. schools like Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the non-profit DTR has setup in Switzerland for its work and has been funded to date by individual investors and the blockchain-focused Pantera Capital.
Bitcoin’s proposed second-layer scaling solution, the Lightning Network, is still far from maturity. And there’s no hard date yet set for Ethereum’s scaling-centric “Serenity” 2.0 update. Unit-e looks to beat these blockchain heavyweights to the scaling punch early.
Making an Academic Climb from Behind, Where to?
The formalization of the project builds off the vision laid out in the DTR’s Jan. 2019 research manifesto, “Decentralized Payment Systems: Principles and Design.”
“Bitcoin has shown us that distributed trust is possible but its just not scaling at a dimension that could make it a truly global everyday money,” DTR researcher Pramod Viswanath said on Unit-e’s announcement.
Of course, whether Unit-e will be able to gain global traction upon its launch is a standing question for now. Yet the rat race is on, and the project is just the latest comer to keep the ecosystem’s focus lasered in on scaling.
Unit-e may thrive, or it may fall by the wayside when all is said and done. But the project continues in the stead of its cryptocurrency forerunners: pursuing the mission of a viable e-currency.
A lot of people automatically dismiss e-currency as a lost cause because of all the companies that failed since the 1990’s. I hope it’s obvious it was only the centrally controlled nature of those systems that doomed them.
— Satoshi Nakamoto Bot (@NakamotoQuotes) January 17, 2019
What’s your take? Will you be watching Unit-e later this year? Let us know in the comments section below.
Images via Pixabay
