Conflux @Consensus 2019: Breaking Through the Technical Bottleneck for Blockchain Mass Adoption
Consensus 2019 with the theme of “Business, Market and Technology” was held in New York from May 13th to May 15th. Global giants from an assortment of industries including internet companies, investment, and financial institutions, along with academics descended onto New York City to discuss the future and mass adoption potential of blockchain technology.
As one of the most prominent projects in the blockchain industry, Conflux was also invited to participate in the consensus conference.
Dr. Long Fan: The blockchain industry is like a casino
Conflux co-founder Dr. Long Fan delivered a speech on “The Key Technical Challenges in Blockchain” on the 15th. The Keynote was centered around the current pain points of the blockchain industry, the technical bottlenecks that are obstructing mass adoption of the technology, and a look at on how Conflux tackles these issues from both a consensus mechanism and performance perspective.
In the speech, Fan addressed two points among several other blockchain development key challenges in the current stage: how to systematically transfer information from the outside world to the blockchain in a decentralized manner, and how to ensure blockchain collect and storage mass data, without sacrificing decentralization and security. Meanwhile, he pointed out four major factors contribute to blockchain scalability: computation power, network, storage, and consensus. While top priority was to solve the shortcomings of the consensus mechanism, advancing all four aspects would be inevitable.
Built on the aforementioned, Conflux was designed and now is verified to be able to solve pain points in those aspects. Unlike other blockchain protocols, Conflux implements a unique Tree Graph (TG) structure, which is different from the chain structure or DAG that can only have one kind of parent edge. On Conflux TG Structure, each block has two kinds of edges — one parent edge and reference edges. An edge to a parent block keeps the same features as the traditional blockchain structure, while reference edges mainly act in sequencing the blocks.
A couple of other highlights to be noticed: decentralization, optimal throughput, and optimal latency verification. Conflux achieves 9.38 Mbps throughput and generates 4 blocks per second, while capable of expanding to 12,000 full-node and 3000–6000 transactions per second (TPS) with 17S transaction confirmation time. Conflux testnet has been activated since April of 2019, and the mainnet is about to launch in Q4 of 2019.
Fireside Chat: Mass Adoption of Blockchain Technology
After Fan’s speech, blockchain influencer Mr. Haseeb Qureshi, IoTeX CEO Mr. Raullen Chai and Fan himself engaged in a heated discussion on the future direction of blockchain mass adoption. All three panelists agreed that apart from current technical challenges, there are still some key barriers that are confronted by the industry, like public recognition and compliance & regulatory. The emerging of Defi scenarios and the involvement of some traditional key players (like IBM) certainly incentivize the current market. The panelists along with other participants of the event all believe that with effort, time and diligence, wider adoption of the technology will come along not far from now.
