Bitcoin has often been taunted as too “energy-intensive” and too “data-intensive”. The top ten cryptocurrencies by market cap are sometimes “accused” of the same features. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, have now designed a cryptocurrency that is reportedly 99% more data-efficient than other cryptocurrencies.
The innovative alt coin will provide a more scalable network because of its efficiency and speed. The cryptocurrency is called Vault and will be presented officially in February at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium. This is how the MIT report describes their product:
…cryptocurrency that lets users join the network by downloading only a fraction of the total transaction data. It also incorporates techniques that delete empty accounts that take up space, and enables verifications using only the most recent transaction data that are divided and shared across the network, minimizing an individual user’s data storage and processing requirements.
In addition, Vault is revolutionary coin in the sense that it is able to delete all empty accounts and verifies transactions using only the latest transaction data.
Compared to Bitcoin, Vault presents some serious advantages over the “people’s currency”. One of the most profound ones is the block size limit. Vault’s is equal to 10 megabytes, which actually equals exactly 10,000 transactions. Bitcoin, on the other hand, requires a much larger block size, of approximately 150 gigabytes to verify the transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain, which represent 500,000 blocks.
MIT’s cryptocurrency is built on proof-of-stake concept (PoS) named Algorand. Algorand is created by an MIT Engineering Professor, Silvio Micali.
According to the MIT report, the ultimate goal is to create a cryptocurrency that is scalable and hence allows more and more users to join the network.