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.
Zclassic is a fork of Zcash founded by Rhett Creighton but with the 20% founders’ reward and slow start removed. Miners are simply earning their fair reward, we believe they deserve it, and the coin development can be supported by the community. ZCL also differs from ZEC by removing the slow start (source), we are not trying to deliberately engineer scarcity: The Market decides the price. We are using the same parameters which were produced in the now famous secure 'trusted setup meeting' (source) where Peter Todd participated, and he confirmed to us (source) they are safe to use. If just one of the participants kept their key secret and destroyed it, the whole system is secure. Zcash is a cryptocurrency run by the Zero Coin Inc. In order to fund their operations, a 20% mining “Founder’s Reward” is included. Every block, in order to maintain consensus, miners running the Zcash code send 20% of their newly mined rewards to an address controlled by the Zero Coin Inc. Because the Zcash source code is open source, Zclassic simply removes the 20% Founder’s Reward. This gives people the option to mine a blockchain using the same technology of Zcash, but without paying the 20% Founder’s Reward. The mission of Zclassic is to stay as similar to Zcash from a technology perspective, but to never take any pre-mine, founder’s-reward or any other kind of fee that goes to a small group of individuals with special permissions whether elected, appointed, or otherwise.