High-Performance Blockchain tackles the concept of scalability from a completely different angle. Rather than just looking at the software side of things, the project also tackles the hardware aspect. To realize the optimal performance of blockchain applications, things will need to change in the near future. As such, this team is building an architecture which uses thousands of CPU and FPGA resources to create a more versatile and scalable ecosystem. There are a few aspects of the High-Performance Blockchain project to take into account. First of all, there is the chip-level acceleration engine which provides accelerated hardware chips to power this entire ecosystem. Secondly, the software side of the High-Performance Blockchain is integrated with the new dedicated hardware accelerated engine and focuses on depth and scaling customization. Third, the project claims it can produce a throughput in the millions of transactions without any major problems. While all of this sounds amazing, it is difficult to come by any real information regarding the technical aspects of either the hardware or the software side of High-Performance Blockchain. While the team mainly focuses on blockchain integration for real-world business cases, it remains to be seen how their chips will operate and how their algorithms are created. It seems the High-Performance Blockchain project is closely connected to the NEO infrastructure, which could introduce some interesting developments down the line. Building the High-Performance Blockchain infrastructure will take a lot of time and money. As such, the roadmap is filled with milestones which the team aims to achieve in the coming years. A testnet version of this project will be launched at some point in 2018, which will undergo further improvements for several months. The actual manner will launch in Q2 of 2018 if things go according to plan. However, the official version will not go live until mid-2019 at the earliest.
Nano, a low-latency cryptocurrency built on an innovative block-lattice data structure offering unlimited scalability and no transaction fees. Nano by design is a simple protocol with the sole purpose of being a high-performance cryptocurrency. The Nano protocol can run on low-power hardware, allowing it to be a practical, decentralized cryptocurrency for everyday use. The original Nano (RailBlocks) paper and first beta implementation were published in December, 2014, making it one of the first Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based cryptocurrencies [6]. Soon after, other DAG cryptocurrencies began to develop, most notably DagCoin/Byteball and IOTA. These DAG-based cryptocurrencies broke the blockchain mold, improving system performance and security. Byteball achieves consensus by relying on a “main-chain” comprised of honest, reputable and user-trusted “witnesses”, while IOTA achieves consensus via the cumulative PoW of stacked transactions. Nano achieves consensus via a balance-weighted vote on conflicting transactions. This consensus system provides quicker, more deterministic transactions while still maintaining a strong, decentralized system. Nano continues this development and has positioned itself as one of the highest performing cryptocurrencies. Nano is a trustless, feeless, low-latency cryptocurrency that utilizes a novel blocklattice structure and delegated Proof of Stake voting. The network requires minimal resources, no high-power mining hardware, and can process high transaction throughput. All of this is achieved by having individual blockchains for each account, eliminating access issues and inefficiencies of a global data-structure. We identified possible attack vectors on the system and presented arguments on how Nano is resistant to these forms of attacks. Check out CoinBureau for the complete review of Nano.