Introducing the ThunderCore Blockchain Roadmap
By: Chandanmishra Crypto
Tags: Ethereum, Blockchain Scalability, Thunder Announcement, Proof Of Stake, Thunder Research

ThunderCore’s Mission and Strategy

The ThunderCore project was started by Chris Wang, a seasoned entrepreneur with a proven track record as former founder of Playdom, which he grew to 700,000 Daily Active Users before he sold his gaming company to Disney, and Dr. Elaine Shi, the blockchain pioneer in academia, with a simple but revolutionary goal of bringing blockchain to everybody especially those outside of the crypto bubble.

That is why the ThunderCore blockchain has been designed to solve major pain points of developers and users: scalability and usability. The ThunderCore Blockchain does this by leveraging useful pieces of the existing crypto ecosystem (like EVM, programming language, dev/ops tools) and maintaining the security through a theoretically provable technology.

The strategy pursued by ThunderCore to achieve its mission of bringing blockchain to those in and outside of the crypto bubble has been simple: walk the talk aka focus on execution.

This is in sharp contrast to the current crypto space where many projects are all talk and hype and no execution.

The milestones achieved by ThunderCore and the roadmap ahead reflects the strategy of laser focus on execution and delivering on promises to the community.

The strategy pursued by ThunderCore to achieve its mission of bringing blockchain to those in and outside of the crypto bubble has been simple: walk the talk, aka focus on execution.

Current Status (As of May 1st, 2019)

ThunderCore’s Pre-Release Mainnet has been launched. Developers and users can use ThunderCore blockchain and experience the thundering speed of the blockchain along with the low gas costs.

Running full nodes and consensus nodes are not available to the public yet. That is why ThunderCore blockchain is not considered to be publicly launched. After the public launch of the ThunderCore Mainnet in early Q3 2019, anyone can run full node as well as take part in the ThunderCore’s consensus process.

Beginning (Sep 2017)

Chris and Dr. Elaine Shi studied together in the past at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Towards the end of 2017, they both came to a converged viewpoint that scalability and usability were two primary issues hindering wider adoption of the blockchain technology. They decided to join hands and ThunderCore was born with the mission to bring blockchain technology to those outside of crypto. Starting from early 2018 ThunderCore project started attracting top technology talent from around the world.

Thunderella Paper (Jan 2018)

Thunderella research paper outlines the technology which is the bedrock of the ThunderCore blockchain. It introduces the concept of pairing a fast chain with a slow chain to transcend the blockchain trilemma.

Thunderella paper led to the start of the ThunderCore project. And rather than focusing on shilling tokens, ThunderCore project started assembling the best in class technology team to execute and build the scalable blockchain to be used by those in and outside of crypto.

ThunderCore 0.1 (April 2018)

This milestone involved the implementation of the core consensus protocol of ThunderCore. The blocks were getting produced, voted upon by the committee members and notarized.

ThunderCore 0.2 (May 2018)

The EVM compatibility was implemented as part of this milestone. Having EVM compatibility allows any Ethereum developer to use existing Ethereum programming language and development tools to build DApps and smart contracts on ThunderCore. EVM compatibility also allows all existing Ethereum wallets to work with ThunderCore as ThunderCore addresses are same as Ethereum address. And last but not least EVM compatibility allows developers to port any existing Ethereum DApp to ThunderCore with minimal effort.

ThunderCore 0.3 (June 2018)

ThunderCore Testnet was released to the public for experiencing ThunderCore’s thundering speed using ThunderCore’s Testnet tokens (TSTs). ThunderCore provided faucet to the public to get TSTs. Sample applications like chat and slot machine were released. These applications showed the potential of DApps which could leverage the scale of ThunderCore.

ThunderCore 0.4 (Aug 2018)

This milestone involved adding support for multiple accelerators for the ThunderCore blockchain

This allowed another accelerator to take over in the scenario when the existing accelerator failed. This provided reliability and liveness to the ThunderCore blockchain.

ThunderCore 0.5 (Sep 2018)

ThunderCore released the source code for the ThunderCore private chain. ThunderCore private chain allows developers to test their applications/smart contracts locally before deploying it on the ThunderCore blockchain.

We also added and verified support for various tools in the Ethereum ecosystem like Remix and Truffle.

ThunderCore 0.6 (Nov 2018)

With this milestone, we ramped up the transaction throughput of the ThunderCore blockchain beyond 1000 tx/s. We also reduced the confirmation time to be around 1 second. This scalability milestone was achieved on the production network.

ThunderCore 0.9 (Jan 2019)

This milestone was the final leg before firing up the ThunderCore Mainnet blockchain. ThunderCore runs the identical code in both the Testnet and the Mainnet. It ensures reliable testability of DApps on the Testnet. ThunderCore made sure that the Mainnet code ran smoothly on the Testnet for a few weeks before the Mainnet was started. This milestone involved upgrading the Testnet code to the final code going to be deployed on the Mainnet. Following this, the Testnet was monitored carefully to look for any bugs or security issues.

ThunderCore Mainnet Pre-Release (Feb 2019)

ThunderCore Mainnet became live and started producing blocks. ThunderCore invited developers and users to use the ThunderCore by releasing a faucet which gives away ThunderCore tokens (Thunder Tokens).

There are some major upgrades planned in the years ahead for the ThunderCore blockchain. These upgrades involve incorporating features which will bring ThunderCore closer to those outside of crypto.

A tip of the hat to the thundering speed of the ThunderCore blockchain, all the release names have some association with the word Thunder.

ThunderCore Full Node Release (May 2019)

ThunderCore will open source the full node code which anyone can compile to run the full node for ThunderCore. A full node will let the users keep track of blockchain state independently and submit transactions without going through the RPC URL.

ThunderCore Jupiter Public Launch (May 2019)

Jupiter is the Roman God of thunder, lightning, and storms.

The ThunderCore public launch will mean that anyone can take part in ThunderCore’s proof of stake (POS) consensus mechanism and run full nodes. Upon public launch, it will be expected that the public will have regular avenues of acquiring tokens, not just the faucet.

ThunderCore Haikili (Q4 2019)

Haikili is the Hawaiian God of thunder.

To bring blockchain to everybody, one of the ThunderCore’s goal has been to reduce all the friction points which developers face when developing applications on the blockchains. ThunderCore Haikili will release important features which will make DApp development on ThunderCore exponentially easier than other blockchains like Ethereum.

DApp funded gas costs: All the growth of the internet (barring e-commerce companies) in the last 30 years was driven by the freemium model of websites and businesses. Imagine “twitter” ever being popular if users had to be charged for sign up and posting tweets. To attract typical application developers to the blockchain world, having freemium model support is a must. Imagine crypto novices starting on the blockchain and having to deal with gas costs, it is just a non-starter. ThunderCore believes that following sequence of events is a must for the wider blockchain user adoption: Remove friction for developers => Developers build awesome apps => Users come in droves to use those awesome apps => Lot of users adopt blockchain. As part of this release, ThunderCore will allow DApps to pay for gas costs of the users and users can sample DApps without needing to buy tokens or spending tokens. Cross-chain assets: ThunderCore realizes that there is an existing thriving ecosystem which has built around Ethereum. This includes programming languages, dev tools, and wallets around EVM. That is why ThunderCore made an important decision from day 1 to be EVM compatible. But there is another piece to the Ethereum ecosystem which is thriving: It’s the ecosystem of various digital assets and their standards being created on Ethereum. Be it non-fungible tokens (NFTs) like Crypto Kitties or stable coins like DAI or USDC. It is unrealistic to assume that despite ThunderCore being technically superior, the whole Ethereum digital asset ecosystem will be recreated on ThunderCore immediately. That is why ThunderCore will release cross-chain assets support which will allow developers and users to leverage their ERC-20, ERC-721 and other types of digital assets on ThunderCore. Imagine building a super fast game on ThunderCore which will use the crypto kitties which users bought on Ethereum. Imagine playing a real-time interactive poker game on ThunderCore where bets are placed in DAI.

ThunderCore Indra (Q2 2020)

Indra is the Hindu God of rains and thunder.

As more developers deploy DApps on ThunderCore and more users start using ThunderCore we expect the need for enhancements which ThunderCore will address in this release:

Scale to 10000+ Txn/s: Given the development of new types of scalability demanding DApps, we expect demand for ThunderCore blockchain to exceed its initial throughput of 1000 txn/s. Hence, as part of this release, ThunderCore will increase scale to 10000+ txn/s. Increasing throughput will also increase transaction fees which in turn will provide a greater financial incentive for users to take part in the POS consensus scheme. Storage optimization: Increasing scale to 10000+ txn/s, will lead to huge bloat in the blockchain data. Such a situation will be unsustainable without optimizing the storage scheme on the ThunderCore blockchain. This release will introduce a slew of changes to optimize storage on the ThunderCore blockchain. eWASM support: To enable DApp developers to build a richer set of applications, ThunderCore will start supporting eWASM in addition to Solidity.

ThunderCore Raijin (Q2 2021)

Raijin is a God of lightning, thunder, and storms in Japanese mythology.

By 2021, we expect ThunderCore

Multiple blockchains as the fallback: One of the key components of the ThunderCore blockchain is that it amplifies its security by using an existing popular blockchain like Ethereum as a fallback. Two years is like a century in the crypto world. It is possible that Ethereum cannot provide the security guarantee which ThunderCore blockchain might need. Hence, we will add support for multiple blockchains to be used as the fallback. These blockchains will amplify the security and decentralization of the ThunderCore blockchain. Privacy support: Transparency as a feature for the public blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin has been a hurdle for blockchain adoption in many enterprise applications especially in fields of finance and healthcare. ThunderCore believes that current research on blockchain privacy is still nascent. As part of ThunderCore Raijin release, we hope to enable private smart contracts as well as private transactions. This will enable many serious open/decentralized finance applications.

In Nutshell

ThunderCore has achieved a lot in a short time and has some ambitious plans ahead. Needless to say in a dynamic space like crypto, we will tweak our roadmap based on the community feedback.

In the next blog post, we will discuss the impressive achievements of the ThunderCore research team and their ambitious plans heading into the future.

If you are a DApp developer, you can seamlessly port your existing DApps to ThunderCore to take advantage of its scalability.

As the user, you can already experience a bunch of interesting and fun DApps on ThunderCore.