Technology makes progress all the time. When the technology is young, the rate of progress is the fastest, with different approaches for applying the technology being tested, learning from what works and what doesn’t, and evolving along various use cases.
Proof of Work based blockchains were a great first implementation of the permission-less paradigm, and are still and will likely remain a good vehicle for “storing value” given their emission properties; similar to gold.
What they are not good at however is handling high-volume, time-critical transactions (transactions on these PoW blockchains are very slow, expensive, and not user friendly).
There are two main ways that exist right now that can enable these high-volume, time-critical transactions that can stand the test of real point-of-sale environments:
- Develop a second layer Proof-of-stake side chains - that’s what the original GRAFT was all about. While much better at handling real-time transactions and high TPS, they are still subject to some of the underlying limitations of PoW.
- By developing a separate Proof-of-stake blockchain that is disconnected from the PoW layer.
We know that second approach will win out in the end, so while we’re starting with the first one, we have to make sure we don’t get left behind by missing the opportunity to “skate where the puck is going”. With that we’d like to lift up the curtain a little bit around our thinking regarding the next generation of GRAFT.
Primary Objectives of the LYRA
- Create a payment system that would keep and extend the main GRAFT project principals, proposals, and achievements such as privacy, real time authorizations, buyer-friendly fee structure, multi-currency support, special merchant transaction flows, custom merchant tokens, participating economy, and more (see original GRAFT white paper for more details)
- Eliminate Proof of Work altogether
- Provide virtually unlimited scalability to enable TPS (transactions per second) rates competitive with traditional payment processing networks
- Eliminate a prolonged locking of funds in user wallets (both payer and payee) caused by waiting for multiple “block confirmations”
- Reduce to the network latency that affects transaction authorization times
- Eliminate dependence on one large and continuously growing blockchain database
- Add open banking features that would provide financial benefits to all stakeholders
- Decouple the payment platform from any specific cryptocurrency
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