InterValue’s Next Generation Blockchain: Why Will Decentralized Applications Eventually Kill Their Centralized Counterparts? (The Social Media Example)
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InterValue’s Next Generation Blockchain: Why Will Decentralized Applications Eventually Kill Their Centralized Counterparts? (The Social Media Example) InterValue Follow Sep 11, 2018 · 3 min read

Why is transaction speed crucial for non-financial applications?

As the first successful implementation of blockchain technology in the world, the Bitcoin protocol has inspired many other projects focused on building decentralized networks for exchanging value and all sorts of assets, data, and information.

However, high transaction throughput and scalability are crucial requirements for blockchain networks to support concrete use cases beyond non-financial applications.

Although Bitcoin is very disruptive and will likely be more and more used as a medium of exchange in the future, its applications are restricted to the financial world. In the past few years, many use cases of blockchain technology for non-financial purposes have been identified. However, running such complex applications usually requires a lot of real-time maintenance and update operations to be performed on a blockchain in order to ensure that the distributed data remains consistent across the network.

Decentralization as a tool for empowerment

One of the most obvious use cases of blockchain technology would be to develop social applications on it. Social media has become ubiquitous and we live in an era where the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat can have a huge impact on our lives. These companies operate on centralized servers hosting user data. Despite their privacy principles stating that users own the information they share, concerns have emerged that the data is being used for commercial or political purposes (see Cambridge Analytica scandal) without users knowing about it. Letting these large organizations control such a huge volume of data, sell it or even censor it overnight poses major problems for their users.

But why do users accept this situation in the first place? Probably because they have no other choice. So far, they have not been offered any credible alternative and must accept to trade off privacy and freedom against the right to use smoothly and fast-running social media for free.

What would be the benefits of taking these social media to the decentralized world? Encrypting data and distributing it across multiple nodes running independently would make it impossible for a single party to control the information. No centralized authority means that users stay in control of their data, without risking it to get stolen, lost or censored. While data collection has long been the main revenue source for large social platforms, decentralization would allow users to decide whether or not they want to monetize their data by selling it to commercial organizations.

InterValue’s innovative solution, the cornerstone of a truly decentralized application ecosystem?

However, there is a major hurdle to overcome: large social platforms have made significant investments to purchase servers and build the infrastructure enabling them to process thousands of concurrent requests and connections at any time of the day. How to reach similar performance standards across a network of nodes operating from different locations and subject to hardware constraints? Currently, existing blockchain networks can only process hundreds and thousands concurrent transaction at best, which greatly affects user experience. Nobody wants to use a platform that takes ages to synchronize. Decentralized social platforms will only become popular if they can process operations in a quasi-instantaneous manner.

Blockchain scientists have been carrying out extensive research into these issues. Among them, the InterValue team probably offers one of the most credible solutions. Leveraging on years of experience as well as a strong innovative spirit, InterValue has designed a protocol that may well revolutionize the whole blockchain industry: thanks to its unique HashNet consensus, InterValue’s network can scale to above 1,000,000 TPS across thousands of nodes, much more than any other blockchain project.

This enables most decentralized applications that require a high number of concurrent operations in order to be deployed on InterValue’s network. On top of speed and scalability, InterValue also offers transaction anonymity as one of the key characteristics of its infrastructure. Running a decentralized social platform on InterValue’s network would not only guarantee ease of use to its users but also enhanced security compared to what traditional centralized platforms provide to their users.

If you are interested in knowing more about InterValue’s technical specificities and how exactly it can achieve such a high amount of concurrent transactions, please refer to the following article:

https://medium.com/@intervalueproject/intervalue-introduces-the-blockchain-4-0-era-c24716ce8102