As a bottom main chain, the rapid rise of thunder chain is incredible. On the one hand, the main chain is the most crowded track in the whole industry. Survey data shows that there are 5000 public chains in the blockchain at present, several times more than the number of registered blockchain development engineers in China. At the same time, the main chain is also facing fierce competition. There are some domestic main chain projects with early start and large team, among which there are several well-known projects in the world, not to mention foreign projects with big halo, such as Ethereum and EOS. Thunderbolt, on the other hand, was officially launched in April 2018, and the team is not keen on publicity, there are no big names as consultants, and it has nothing to do with the legendary 3 o ‘clock community.
But as it turns out, Thunderbolt chain has become the most popular main chain among developers and the main chain with the largest number of applications. In an application competition in July alone, Thunderbolt chain won more than 500 highly practical applications. Four recent barnstorming salons were also packed with developers — not so-called investors, as is common at blockchain salons.
Thunderbolt chain why can win so many developers support? Read the following three key words and you may understand why developers chose Thunderbolt.
Isomorphic multi-chain: high performance and high scalability
Isomorphic multi-chain is the core of thunderbolt chain technology architecture and almost all performance is realized based on this framework.
The so-called multi-chain, refers to the thunderbolt chain running multiple chains at the same time, rather than a single chain hit the world; Isomorphism means that the procedures that make up these chains are the same, and together they are called isomorphic polychains.
The benefits of this framework are extremely high concurrency performance and easy to extend. Thunderbolt chain chief worker to xin had very vividly explained the technical logic, she took the business hall for example. A chain is like a business hall, and transaction processing is equivalent to the user going to the business hall. If there is only one business hall, the user is more than one, the teller can not handle, will queue up, to wait for a long time. This is the problem faced by many single chain main chains at present, business can not be handled, waiting time is too long.
However, no matter how to expand a single business hall, its service processing capacity is also limited. What’s the best way to do that? It is to open a few business hall again, let user nearby, disperse deal with business, this is the most reasonable processing means that uses commonly in real life. Although the business halls are different, they handle the same business. In this way, users can handle the business wherever they want, and there is no need to queue up together, which naturally improves the efficiency of business processing.
This is a popular explanation of isothermal multi-chain. Through such a technical framework, Thunderbolt chain has achieved ultra-high TPS performance of millions, solved the problem of block chain expansion, and has a very convenient capacity expansion. When performance needs to be expanded, open one more chain.
Of course, isomorphic multichains are very simple in logic, but the technical implementation is actually very complicated. In fact, at present, the whole industry is learning how to achieve isomorphic multi-chain, but there is not much that can be taken, which shows that its technical difficulty is very high.
For developers, in order to make practical applications, the TPS performance of the main chain is one of the basic prerequisites. Without high enough performance support, no matter how good the application can not actually run, let alone use.
At the same time, scalability is also a factor to be considered. Once the application is launched in the market, if the number of users increases, the performance needs to be expanded. Otherwise, the service can not keep up with the growth rate of users, which will bring a terrible experience.
Thunderbolt’s TPS processing capacity is high enough to fully meet the needs of the vast majority of actual business scenarios, and at the same time, it can be convenient and easy to expand, becoming the primary reason for many developers to choose Thunderbolt.
DPoA+PBFT consensus mechanism: second confirmation speed and never bifurcation
There are also two factors that developers must consider during the actual business. One is that transaction confirmation needs to be fast enough and users need immediate feedback, otherwise any experience on the chain will break down. Traditional blockchains, with transaction confirmation speeds ranging from seconds to hours, are clearly unworkable.
The other is that traditional blockchain has always had two major operations that do not meet the needs of real scenes. One is forking, and the other is rolling back. In the technical field of blockchain, once the consensus of most people is reached, forking or rolling back can be carried out. However, this is not feasible in a real business scenario, such as when you are shopping on the chain, the page pops up and the order is successful, then there is a rollback, the order is invalid, you need to do it again, such an experience is completely unacceptable. In real life, changes to confirmed transactions are only made with the consent of both parties. If either party refuses, the changes cannot be made, even if the whole world agrees.
Thunderbolt chain according to the actual demand, the relevant performance of the correction. The first is to achieve the second level of transaction confirmation speed, the second is to achieve a strong consistency, never bifurcation.
Rely on is the thunder chain DPoA+PBFT consensus mechanism. The traditional POW consensus mechanism cannot realize the second-level confirmation, because it needs to broadcast the transaction information to every node, and all nodes can be notified before confirmation. So thunderbolt chain adopt the new consensus mechanism, thunderbolt chain based on mass of cloud play guest equipment as its nodes to build block chain services, and to choose the speed stability, smooth transmission and computing power is strong enough nodes, forming an alternative pool, choose some node as a consensus on a regular basis, participate in charge to an account, so you can achieve a piece of speed quickly.
These nodes adopt the improved PBFT algorithm to ensure strong consistency in the distributed system, and have certain fault tolerance and anti-evil capability of Byzantine nodes, which improves the usability of the algorithm.
Then how to ensure that these accounting nodes are not controlled by people? The method is very simple, is the consensus nodes regularly shuffled, re-selection, thunderbolt chain has 1.5 million accounting nodes, who can not say which nodes can be selected, natural impossible to control accounting nodes. And these nodes are growing all the time, so you never have to worry about running out of billing nodes.
In this way, Thunderbolt has solved two of the most troublesome problems in the actual implementation of blockchain applications, in order to win more chips for developers.
TCFS file system: Making big data linking a reality
Another obstacle to block chain application is the storage of files and data. As long as it is an application, there is a demand for data storage. Traditional Internet is realized by setting up computer rooms and buying servers. The decentralized nature of blockchain naturally does not allow such practice. The storage space on a traditional blockchain is provided by each node, and all nodes have to hold complete and identical content to ensure consensus. This seriously hinders the upchain storage of large files and big data, because the capacity of a single node is limited and cannot store large data. Without enough data, the services provided by the application cannot be expanded.
Lightning chain file system TCFS, through redundant coding technology, to solve this problem.
In simple terms, redundant coding is when you cut the file into 40 pieces, but each piece is not 1/40 of the size of the source file, but 1/30 or 1/20, so that all the slices together, maybe twice the size of the source file, there is redundancy, so it’s called redundant coding.
After the slices are finished, the 40 slices are stored on 40 nodes respectively, so that the storage space required by each node is not very large. At the same time, because there is redundancy in the slices, even if half of these nodes are not online, the slices on the remaining online nodes can still restore the whole file.
This is the meaning of redundant coding technology and the solution to the pain point of traditional blockchain file storage.
Another problem with blockchain file storage is why do nodes store data for you? This requires an incentive mechanism, and the TCFS file system has created a perfect incentive mechanism to ensure that 1.5 million shared nodes are willing and active to store file data. While achieving low cost, it also ensures high availability, and is closely combined with Thunderbolt chain, which is conducive to the rapid development of blockchain applications.
Both ultra-high performance, and the second level of block, but also very convenient capacity expansion, and do not need to worry about the main chain fork caused by the business crash, in addition to the data file storage problem has been perfectly solved, basically, the current block chain developers worry about the problems, in the Thunderbolt chain have all been successfully solved. In this case, thunderbolt chain naturally becomes the best choice for developers.
Of course, Thunderbolt’s consistent emphasis on application development, including supporting development tools and supporting policies, such as financing, traffic and other aspects of help, have also become an important factor attracting developers. But fundamentally speaking, the above three keywords are the core reason for the decision to choose Thunderbolt for blockchain development. To understand them, we will understand why Thunderbolt is so popular in the circle of blockchain developers, and also understand what is the correct development direction of the main chain.