Event Recap | Pioneers of Blockchain Innovation
“Decentralized systems such as blockchain are there to keep centralized systems in check.”
That is what Taxara CEO Steven Pu believes.
“If everything goes right, they don’t ever have to look at the data on the blockchain. Why? Everyone’s happy. We’re all making money. It doesn’t seem like anyone is cheating. It’s great. But if things go wrong, they can go to the blockchain for arbitration,” Pu said on Dec. 9 at Tsinghua University’s xSpace.
One of Taraxa’s clients is a Japanese company which leases out arcade machines. The company and the clients leasing the machine split the profits the machine earns. In 2018 they expanded globally but soon ran into problems.
“When they were operating this in Japan, everything went smoothly. There were no trust gaps. They had long-term partners. Everyone trusted each other,” Pu said. “They suddenly discovered, surprise, surprise, that people they’re renting the machines to, don’t tell them the truth.”
The company suspect they lost $100 per machine per month and have 20,000 orders waiting in China.
“They won’t dare to fulfill [the orders], because they know they will lose money on every one of those orders. There is no way to agree how many times the machine has been played,” Pu said.
Taraxa’s solution is installing devices into the machines in a way that no one can tamper with them. The device sends and receives the data and uploads it into the cloud. The data is hashed periodically and this hash is put on the blockchain.
“This device is completely, absolutely independent. Once you activate it, it cannot be touched. It just does whatever it does. You cannot change its behaviour. If the code is wrong, sorry, have to throw it away and put a new one in,” Pu said.
Conflux’s research director Yang Guang said in his presentation there are three big challenges blockchain is facing: scaling, decentralization, and robustness. Conflux is tackling these problems by rearranging the blocks on the blockchain from a linear structure to a Tree-Graph.
Conflux encourages miners to generate blocks under a Proof-of-Work mechanism. Nodes generate blocks in parallel, thus making information processing faster. The generated blocks are ordered in a Tree-Graph structure.
Conflux then uses their GHAST algorithm which gives every block a different weight, generates a new block every 0.25 seconds and takes about 20 seconds to confirm each block. This has resulted in Conflux processing 1,400 to 3,500 transactions per second.
TIBA is the International Students Blockchain Association from Tsinghua University. Our goal is to bridge the gap between students and the industry, between the Chinese and international communities, and to help everyone work together to realize the potential of blockchain.
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This article was written by Nico Gous and edited by Péter Garamvölgyi. Photos were taken by Nico Gous.
