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Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2020 12:10:00 -0800<\/strong><\/p>\n Brooklyn-based startup Kadena<\/a>\u00a0has\u00a0launched a hybrid blockchain that can scale horizontally, enabling multiple electronic ledgers to talk to each other via smart contracts \u2013 and letting users transfer cryptocurrency between the chains.<\/p>\n Hybrid blockchains combine permissioned chains for businesses to transact in the background while connecting to a public blockchain (via an API) for consumers and others to make money transfers or access information about products moving across supply chains.<\/p>\n \u201cTheir hybrid blockchain model looks interesting, mainly because it enables interoperability via smart contracts that run on public chains and talk to\/with private chains,\u201d said Avivah Litan, a vice president of research at Gartner. \u201cThat way, enterprises can keep their private data and transactions limited to the private chain but benefit from the liquidity and cross-chain access available by leveraging smart contracts running on the public chain.\u201d<\/p>\n BrandPost<\/span> Sponsored by HPE <\/span> <\/p>\n Defining the Next Chapter for the IT Industry: On-Premises IT-as-a-Service<\/a> <\/p>\n The \u201cAs a Service\u201d model delivers services, not products; flexibility, not rigidity; and costs that align to business outcomes.<\/p>\n Kadina’s Chainweb architecture depicted in a graphic.<\/p>\n Kadena\u00a0is being piloted for interoperability, scalability and increased security across industries, including\u00a0finance<\/a>,\u00a0healthcare<\/a> and insurance, according to Kadena co-founder and CEO Will Martino.\u00a0For example,\u00a0Rymedi<\/a>, a North Carolina medical technology firm, plans to test the platform this year as part of an FDA-backed pilot of prescription drug tracking<\/a>\u00a0via a blockchain supply chain.<\/p>\n Kadena is the first startup to come out of JP Morgan\u2019s Blockchain Center for Excellence<\/a>, a development project started in 2018. Last year, JP Morgan announced it had created its own cash-backed cryptocurrency called JPM Coin, which it plans to pilot with institutional clients for international funds transfers.<\/p>\n Kadena’s\u00a0Chainweb peer-to-peer platform<\/a> also relies on\u00a0sharding<\/a> to increase transactional throughput by creating multiple proof-of-work consensus-based<\/a> partitions on its blockchain ledger through which multiple parallel chains can operate.<\/p>\n Because a single platform can be parsed, there\u2019s theoretically no limit to the number parallel chains that can be created on the company\u2019s platform, according to Martino.<\/p>\n \u201cWe’ve figured out how to horizontally scale this core concept of the ledger found at Layer 1 without needing to centralize any part of the platform,\u201d Martino said. \u201cIt’s a major moment for decentralized distributed systems, as horizontal scaling this far down the stack has been a dream of many for at least a decade.\u201d<\/p>\n In Kadena\u2019s blockchain, Layer 1 is the layer over which currency and a state ledger operates. There is infrastructure beneath Layer 1 related to propagation, peer-to-peer communications, storage, cryptocurrency mining and more, but Layer 1 is where cryptocurrency and smart contracts first show up.\u00a0<\/p>\n A metaphor for Layer 1 would be one bank account and three credit cards; the\u00a0 bank account would be the fundamental Layer 1 ledger, and the three credit cards would represent Layer 2 scaling.<\/p>\n “The cards settle through your bank account, but your bank account doesn’t settle through anything else. Your bank account has a single sequential ledger of transactions, as it has to decide the order of transactions,” Martino said “But, you can do transactions simultaneously on Layer 2 by using more than one card at the same time. Most other blockchain projects are trying to scale via adding cards.\u00a0Kadena scaled by figuring out how to let you have a bank account at more than one bank.”<\/p>\n So far, the company has gone live with 10 chains on a single platform, but it plans to pilot ones with as many as 50 this year. Kadena\u2019s \u201cbraided\u201d blockchain network has so far demonstrated it can process up to 750 transactions per second or 40 terahashes per second (40 trillion hashing operations per second). The higher the number of terahashes, the more difficult it is for someone to attempt to game the system.<\/p>\n \u201cInstead of hashing and mining pointing at a single block, miners can mine blocks for any of 10 chains in a network,\u201d Martino said. \u201cInstead of one chain and one conduit for throughput for transactions, we have 10.\u201d<\/p>\n Gartner\u2019s Litan, however, said Kadena\u2019s technology does have challenges, not the least of which is its permissioned-public hybrid environment. That could complicate challenges that already exist with enterprise blockchain smart contracts.<\/p>\n Those challenges include:<\/p>\n \u201cKadena would likely disagree with these challenges, but that\u2019s how we see them,\u201d Litan said.<\/p>\n Kadena\u2019s proprietary smart-contract language called Pact<\/a>, can also instruct a node (computer) on what the code means, or its purpose. For example, a smart contract coded with Pact can instruct a blockchain ledger to forbid users of cryptocurrency from going into debt, meaning the ledger balance can never go below zero.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the idea that I can run my code and then write what I intended it to do with it, and the computer can understand both my intent and what code means,\u201d Martino said.<\/p>\n Essentially, the single blockchain platform can host multiple ledgers, each new ledger connected via an API to previous ones. In connecting the ledger, the processing power or hashing capability of nodes is divided among them and cryptocurrency and other data can be shared between the ledgers.<\/p>\n \u201cIf one [ledger] gets saturated, it doesn\u2019t affect the throughput of another. You can horizontally scale this,\u201d Martino said.<\/p>\n Kadena is also integrating its digital wallet<\/a>, Chainweaver, with the Cosmos Network<\/a>, an inter-blockchain communications protocol that enables multiple blockchains to communicate between one another, enabling cryptocurrency transfers across disparate blockchains.<\/p>\n \u201cKadena is one of the start-ups that stands out from the crowd,\u201d said Martha Bennett, a Forrester vice president of research. \u201cA key differentiator is the firm\u2019s focus on, and understanding of, the requirements of enterprise-grade systems. Clearly, it\u2019s too soon to tell how much traction Kadena will gain \u2013 it\u2019s early days yet. But from a technology perspective, it\u2019s one of the few that I regard as worth watching; the hybrid model is also a differentiator.\u201d<\/p>\n http:\/\/www.computerworld.com\/category\/security\/index.rss<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2020 12:10:00 -0800<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n