This article comes fromWired, original author: Gian Volpicelli
Odaily Translator |
Odaily Translator |One of the key moments in Facebooks progress towards creating Libra came in February 2019, when the company announcedbuybuy
Chainspace, a London-based blockchain joint venture registered in Gibraltar. Chainspaces membership includes several academics from the UCL Information Security Research Group, including George Danezis, a leading privacy engineering researcher in the UK. (Danezis did not respond to an interview request.)
Founded in early 2018, Chainspace has had several noteworthy accomplishments during its relatively short lifespan. Blockchains (the digital conduits for exchanging cryptocurrencies and other encrypted assets) are supposed to be decentralized, with transactions processed and verified by a group of independent computers rather than by a single arbiter such as a central bank. Decentralization makes the system less vulnerable to being hacked or shut down, but it takes time: for example, the Bitcoin blockchain can only process about 7 payments per second, while Ethereum can handle about twice as many payments; By comparison, the centralized payments network Visa processes 24,000 transactions per second.BlockmaniaChainspace hopes that by utilizing sharding technology and aCoconutTo overcome these problems, a transaction verification system (or consensus protocol) can theoretically process up to 400,000 transactions per second. The third Chainspace invention is called
A program that can greatly improve the privacy of blockchain users.DecodeThe open source research portion of Chainspace gets
support. Decode, a European Commission-funded project, aims to increase European citizens control over their personal data. Ironically, the work of an EU-backed company working on decentralization and privacy has caught the eye of Facebook, the data monopoly that has been fined by the EU.
According to sources familiar with the blockchain industry, Facebook’s move should primarily be read as a “talent acquisition” — an acquisition driven by the acquisition of Chainspace’s employees rather than an interest in the individual technologies they developed. The startups team members have valuable, relatively rare resumes, as they combine blockchain development experience with a solid academic background. Their work in creating scalable systems will come in handy for a company eager to launch a cryptocurrency to 2.3 billion users worldwide.This week (June 18), less than six months after acquiring Chainspace, Facebook announced that. George Danezis, Shehar Bano, Alberto Sonnino from Chainspace are all listed as co-authors of the main technical white paper and some other key documents. But there is notably no mention of Chainspace technology in Libras blueprint. A paper describing the Libra consensus scheme HotStuffReportReport
There are references to Blockmania. The main documentation mentions sharding, but thats a future implementation, not a current feature.All of this is expected and indeed consistent with Libras current makeup. Chainspace develops technology for decentralized leaderless blockchains, similar to Bitcoin or Ethereum. Unlike the description in the white paper, Libra was tweetedBlockchain TycoonDescribed as a centralized, hosted project. Libra transactions will be processed by a set of validators, currently onlyLibra AssociationMembers include big companies like Facebook, Uber, and eBay. The goal is to gradually open up membership over the next five years until the validator network includes people who hold a certain amount of Libra coins. An optimistic assumption is that by that stage, Chainspaces privacy-preserving, decentralization-enabling tools might be introduced. Its hard to guarantee that this will happen, or that Facebook will be more decentralized in five years time. (U.S. regulators have called on Facebook to。)
Suspension of Libra developmentNym TechnologiesAs of today, some elements of Chainspace’s technology live on in another startup.PanoramixThe company is creating a “hybrid web” — a blockchain-powered platform for anonymous cryptocurrency payments, messaging and web navigation — based on the Coconut Privacy Protocol. The project grew out of a European Commission-funded project launched in 2015, which aims to develop an alternative to the privacy-focused Internet browser Tor. Before Facebook acquired Chainspace, Danezis worked at Panoramix and contributed to Nymsupply enquiry
Chainspace co-founder Dave Hrycyszyn recently joined Nym as chief technology officer (CTO), after briefly working in Facebooks blockchain department; Chainspace co-founder Mustafa Al-Bassam did not join Facebook in February this year, and now Is an advisor to Nym.
