MIT Researchers Develop Cryptocurrency That Is Up to 99% More Efficient Than Bitcoin

Researchers at the Massachusett Institute of Technology (MIT) have come up with a cryptocurrency known as Vault that is set to revolutionize the cryptocurrency industry. First, the cryptocurrency network reduces the need for large data to join the network and verify transactions as well as reduces memory consumption.

No need to spend so much

The need to download the full blockchain for a cryptocurrency from inception in order to be fully involved in transaction verification and to maintain the network integrity is the case for decentralized cryptocurrency now. This is a major hindrance to scalability according to the researchers as not everyone can afford to pay for a large amount of data and powerful computers to download such blockchains.

Co-author of a paper that will soon be presented on the Vault cryptocurrency, Derek Leung, said:

“Currently there are a lot of cryptocurrencies, but they’re hitting bottlenecks related to joining the system as a new user and to storage. The broad goal here is to enable cryptocurrencies to scale well for more and more users.”

To join the Vault network, users only need to download a small fraction of the blockchain data and they will still be able to participate fully. This cuts down data consumption by at least 90% and saves computer memory for other uses. Speaking of memory, the design also allows the network to remove any empty accounts that are taking up space to make room for credible transactions.

Proof-of-Stake instead of Proof-of-Work

A vault was built on a cryptocurrency network called Algorand which uses Proof-of-Stake as its means of verifying transactions. The name Vault refers to how the transactions are stacked. Leung explains it better.

“A vault is a place where you can store money, but the blockchain also lets you ‘vault’ over blocks when joining a network. When I’m bootstrapping, I only need a block from way in the past to verify a block way in the future. I can skip over all blocks in between, which saves us a lot of bandwidth.”

That means no need to verify transactions sequentially instead, new users can just match a transaction somewhere in the past, also known as “breadcrumb” and match it to another “breadcrumb” somewhere maybe thousands of transactions ahead to verify it and they are all set.

The paper on the cryptocurrency which is to be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium next month is titled “Spun”. More details on the cryptocurrency can be found here.