By
Bena Ilyas
April 25th, 2024
Alza’s infrastructure has set the new standard for the sphere: the scalability already achieved by EOS is now combined with high level of decentralization, making this infrastructure a real candidate for massive business adoption in the near future.
Every last one of blockchain enthusiasts can give dozens of examples how this technology can change the real world business. But the truth is that public chains are still far from being perfect. The challenge is to create the system that satisfies all the demands of business and – in the same time – maintains the balance between scalability, security, and decentralization.
For the long time the high scalability seemed to be the most problematic issue. BTC, public chain era 1.0, was a pioneer in the sphere. It obviously deserves credit for leading the way; nevertheless, this chain had no business potential with 4 transactions per second. ETH took a big step forward and became the representative of blockchain era 2.0. The popularization of the smart contracts technology has given a new boost to the development of blockchain – but the scalability stayed almost the same with 10 transactions per second. The latest newsmaker in this sphere is EOS – the representative of public chain era 3.0. That is the first chain that has achieved the scalability suitable for the real-world business: 10,000 transactions per second. Unfortunately, the price for this technological breakthrough is the weakening of decentralization. However, it was the most promising candidate for the massive business adoption. Anyway, the new player arrives at the table.
Public Chain Era 4.0
The public chain era 4.0 is already here represented by ALZA. This off-chain technology powered infrastructure combines several innovative solutions that bring this chain to the new level. ALZA’s strong point is the professional and even academic approach to the development. The project’s white paper is not only a source of information for the interested users – it is also a study published and accredited by Cornell University. This fact is a litmus test for the success of a public chain as only a few of them have managed to get this honor (well-known examples are previously mentioned BTC and ETH).
One of the most problematic concepts for blockchain has always been its scalability. The roots of this problem can be easily explained by the main principles of the Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism. All transactions not only require the confirmation by all users, they also store their history in the storage space of each user. The security and decentralization are the unquestionable advantages of this approach but the price is the ridiculously low number of transactions per second.
The things changed with the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) mechanism adopted both by EOS and ALZA. This technology implies the usage of super nodes that generate blocks every 3 seconds and solves the issues of task distribution and operational resources’ inspections. The 23 super nodes of ALZA – which is two more than EOS has set – have dramatically reduced the amount of repetitive checks for the participants of the chain.
The usage of the DPoS mechanism is raising the scalability to thousands of transactions per second, but ALZA has implemented a number of other cutting-edge technologies to create a solution that can conquer the real-world business. The off-chain payment is one of them.
Enhanced Scalability vs. Redused Costs
The main concept of the off-chain payment is easy to guess from its name: the transaction is not processed in the main chain. The transaction procession and the associated data stay in a self-organized payment field. The reduced number of witnessing users (that are referred to as Satellite Nodes in ALZA’s terms) as well as the optimization of data transactions create the opportunity to process transactions with delay of a few milliseconds and minor cost. Only the final account status gets hashed and updated to the main chain.
The ALZA infrastructure provides an option of increasing the amount of verification resources for the extra-secure transaction processing – but this feature requires extra fee as it rises the overall cost of transaction. This is a typical market-based mechanism – which is a good sign for the system that aims at wide business usage.
ALZA is full of innovative technologies, but the main achievement of this project is Redundant Array of Satellite Infrastructure, or RaFi. This mechanism proves that decentralization, high throughput and robustness of the chain can be implemented within one infrastructure.
The ALZA chain is divided into a large number of clusters; each one of them consists of satellite nodes and a name node responsible for the data arrangement within the cluster. This name node is the center element of each cluster. When a transaction is processed, it gets all the transaction data and sends it to 3 satellite nodes for storing it in redundant array. The data request also goes to the name node.
Improved Storage Capacities
The fact that all the data is stored just in 3 random nodes is the explanation of ALZA’s amazing storage capacity – and the team is already testing the solutions for its further escalation. The security of data does not suffer from this approach: each cluster also has additional checkpoint nodes and backup nodes.
The security-scalability-decentralization balance is the key to the blockchain breakthrough, and at the moment ALZA is offering the leading solution in this sphere. The academic approach characteristic of BTC and ETH helped in developing the variety of innovative ideas. The scalability achieved both by EOS and ALZA is a blockchain’s pass to big business.
ALZA has not only significantly increased the amount of transactions per second – it has managed to maintain the balance between this scalability and decentralization. Security, low costs, and fast speed – all of these advantages of blockchain have never been closer to massive usage in real-world business. ALZA is a true pioneer of a new era – blockchain era 4.0.