By
Temitope Olatunji
April 15th, 2024
The release of Skycoin Fiber Platform is on the way – a direct response to existing blockchain flaws and the foundation of “Blockchain 3.0”.
Skycoin Fiber represents itself a showcase development project that promises to address the fundamental issues related to existing blockchain implementations.
Despite being difficult to operate and maintain, distributed ledger technology is seeing increasing use and adoption. Blockchain operators, commonly referred to as miners, essentially have to run extremely complex algorithms to solve mathematical cryptographic puzzles resulting in verification of transactions across a distributed network.
To verify and secure the network, blockchains rely on one of several consensus protocols to build these blocks of data, such as Proof-of-Work (PoW), Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and delegated Proof-of-Stake (DpoS). Each protocol has its own benefits, as well as comes with unique shortfalls.
Ethereum was created by Russian programmer Vitalik Buterin and his team in 2013 as a direct response to address the perceived shortcomings of Bitcoin’s blockchain. The vision was a blockchain platform that could host decentralized applications (dApps), and this iteration of Ethereum was called “Blockchain 2.0”. It featured an improved mining protocol and introduced the novel concept of smart contracts, which allowed for complex logic solutions with deterministic execution, improving on straightforward transactions.
Today, Ethereum hosts a growing list of over 1,000 sub-chains serving diverse industries from fintech, games and supply chain solutions.
While Ethereum had vastly improved on reducing the amount of computational power necessary to verify transactions, it was unable to improve on network’s congestions during spikes in transaction volume. This represents a persisting problem, as when the Ethereum network’s capacity is stretched, its sub-chains are affected. ERC20- compliant tokens and gaming dApss, such as Cryptokitties, have famously brought Ethereum to a near standstill, causing transaction fees to spike.
Even with the advent of Ethereum and “Blockchain 2.0”, a group of early developers connected with both Bitcoin and Ethereum recognized the unaddressed flaws of distributed networking and consensus algorithms. Thus was Skycoin Fiber born.
Skycoin’s Fiber network was built from scratch, using the feature-rich and robust CX programming language, coded without any reliance on existing blockchain infrastructure, designed to be robust, customizable and infinitely scalable.
Its architectural design is a direct response to existing blockchain flaws. With its Obelisk consensus protocol reliant on a “web of trust” certificate authority, the work or computational power required to mine is vastly reduced.
The network maintains priority on speed with near-instant transactions, with each dAPP or token owning its very own blockchain, cutting off the old parent and child chain relationships proven by Ethereum to be parasitic instead of symbiotic peer chains like Fiber. Fiber is completely interoperable across different blockchains, utilizing seamless atomic swaps and other technologies, without affecting network performance.
Ethereum will always be recognized for allowing developers to build on trusted networks, despite failing to sufficiently address interoperability and scalability.
Each token or dAPP on Skycoin’s Fiber platform will be a validated fork of Skycoin tailored to its unique requirements. As soon as new tokens launch, they will immediately benefit from inherent interoperabillity, eliminating the struggle for recognition on exchange listings. All new tokens are instant members of the Fiber exchange protocol.
Fiber will be a platform for dApps, running on the network built by Skycoin. Tokens and dApps can choose to operate independently or integrate with Skycoin and other Fiber-integrated tokens.