In a report released by the World Economic Forum in 2016, blockchain technology was recognized as one of the emerging technologies set to disrupt the society.
Also, pundits have further estimated that blockchain technology will disrupt several prime sectors such as healthcare, banking, real estate, education, cyber-security etc., due to its distributed and encrypted digital ledger nature that has the ability to provide a decentralized, swift and transparent means for transactions while maintaining high-level security. This emergence of blockchain has further led to the appreciation of cryptocurrencies.
Having realized the potentials of blockchain technologies, several companies have since sprung up to leverage on the technology in order to enhance and incorporate it into their daily business processes. However, there seems to be some resentment towards the full utilization because the typical blockchain networks such as bitcoin and ethereum still have some defects such as low performance, poor scalability, poor security, high transaction fees and technical difficulties with applying it to the mass market. These issues have further limited the massive acceptance of blockchain and cryptocurrencies on a general scale. For example, transactions processing in the traditional finance systems is quite cumbersome and payments could take as long as 1–3 days making the whole process slow. However, the typical blockchain networks such as bitcoins and ethereum that are meant to address this anomaly, unfortunately also exhibit some of these issues. In the case of bitcoin, it consumes high energy during blocks and transaction processing. On the other hand, the ethereum network can easily get congested whenever a single large business operation is ongoing, thereby affecting other transaction processing in the network.
In addition to this, is the issue of high technical difficulties. Organizations still experience challenges with utilizing typical blockchain networks because the process involved in creating normal decentralized applications that can be easily deployed on existing blockchains is quite strenuous. These issues have further limited the acceptance of blockchain in the society.
Due to this, High-Performance Blockchain (HPB) is proposing a different model to bridge the current gaps in the blockchain industry.
High-Performance Blockchain (HPB) aims to improve on the existing blockchain to provide a new blockchain architecture that meets the real world industry demands. High-Performance Blockchain (HPB) aims to make blockchain usable for several real-life business scenarios. HPB (High-Performance Blockchain) is a public chain based on hardware acceleration chip and original software acceleration system.
COMPONENTS OF THE HPB ARCHITECTURE
The HPB blockchain architecture comprises two main components namely the hardware and software architecture, and is further subdivided into the hardware layer, hardware abstraction layers, middle layers, and implementation layers. The integration of these two components consists of a blend of a high-performance computing (HPC) blockchain, cloud computing, hardware systems with dispersed core nodes, and a communication network and cloud platform that is power-driven by the HPC. This genetic makeup will enable the blockchain architecture to provide a blockchain platform that is user-friendly, seamless, and high performance.
In addition, through the hardware acceleration server, the protocol is able to reach about 10,000 transactions/sec and provide support for a vast number of users with no other interference in the laboratory environment.
The integration of these components will provide a blockchain based business integration. Below briefly highlights the components of the HPB architecture.
BLOCKCHAIN OFFLOAD ENGINE (BOE)
One of the major challenges of the typical blockchain nodes is that transaction verification, broadcasting, block broadcasting and packaging are executed on the software layer. However, due to the fact that nodes are connected serially, it often leads to a compound network environment, low performance and long delay time.
Having realized this, HPB decided to introduce the Blockchain Offload Engine (BOE) as a better alternative to address the current issues. This is because the BOE is a processing system that comprises the hardware, firmware, and software, thus making it heterogeneous in nature. In addition, the BOE is able to attain high performance and computing acceleration because it integrates both the serial and parallel processing capacity of FGPA/ASIC chips. The BOE engine interacts with several other nodes in the network, and due to this, it is able to carry out different functions such as integrity and account balance checks, signature ratification and several other functions.
As it was earlier stated that through the hardware acceleration server, the protocol is able to reach about 10,000 transactions/sec, this is made possible because the BOE engine makes use of several other modules such as ECDA, hardware random number generator, data fragmentation etc., during the process. For example, through the combination of the BOE and ECDSA module, the verification of signature during a transaction process will highly swift and swift, thereby enabling the network to verify millions of signatures within a second.
In addition, the BOE makes use of a hardware random number generator to safeguard the encrypted channel during the transmission of data between nodes. Also, it utilizes a block fragmentation technique to enhance the TPS performance and it also provides support for over 10,000 TCP sessions at the same time, thereby lessening the number of distributed network layers to attain significant concurrency connections.
CONSENSUS ALGORITHM
Currently, there are several consensus algorithms such as the Proof of Stake (PoS), Proof of Work (PoW), Delegated Proof of Stake(DPoS) etc, being used by the typical blockchain networks. Hardly will you find any of these current algorithms that are fully scalable, effective and secure. For example, the Proof of Work which is being used by bitcoin meets the need of security and scalability but unfortunately not efficient because the energy consumption during mining is very high. On the other hand, the Proof of Stake is able to meet the demand of efficiency but lacks scalability and security.
Having realized this, HPB adopted a different consensus algorithm model because the current algorithms will not be compatible to meet the needs of the BOE. Due to this, HPB utilized a two-tier election mechanism called inner and outer elections. The outer elections make use of an adaptive consistent election plan to efficiently select the node members that contribute the most out of all the nodes in the system. On the other hand, the inner elections drills further to effectively look for the nodes that contributed the most in every block. The inner elections conduct this search in 3 different stages namely the nomination stage, statistical stage and computing stage.
The nomination stage involves the pre-voting stage. During this stage, the BOE engine randomly generates commits and each of the highest node contributors submits the commits. However, in the statistical stage, the high contribution node members compute all the commits after each voting ends, and then proceed to create a voting pool. On the other hand, the computation stage involves the calculation of the generation priority whenever a new block has been produced. This calculation is usually done by the high contribution node members through a fixed weight algorithm of the commit in the voting pool, and the high contribution node members that have the highest priority in the block will get the block package right.
APPLICATION SERVICES
The HPB architecture will provide support for blockchain APIs and application SDKs. Through JSON-RPC and other RESTful APIs, other blockchain protocols and operations will be able to integrate with the HPB architecture. On the other hand, the architecture will also provide support for several programming languages such as Java, .NET, Ruby, Python and other SDK languages etc.
SMART CONTRACT
The HPB acceleration engine is highly interoperable and flexible because it is able to support several variations of virtual machines such as NeoVM, EthereumVM etc., at any given time, and also effectively provide lifecycle management of every smart contract. Currently, It makes use of an underlying virtual machine that is able to communicate with ledger data and external data via customized APIs.
In addition, HPB provides an end to end system support and monitoring in order to ensure system uptime.
HPB TOKEN USE CASE
As the Transaction Per Second (TPS) performance becomes better, High-Performance Blockchain (HPB) will build up a DAPP ecosystem. Thus, the resultant effect of this is that the value of the HPB token will rise as the DAPP ecosystem also evolves.
Kindly visit http://hpb.io/ for more information.
Whitepaper: http://www.gxn.io/files/hpb_white_paper_en.pdf
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Writer: ammier