Since its mainnet launch almost a year ago IOST has grown to become one of the leading blockchain platforms in the industry. It is an ultra-scalable platform that is able to process 8,000 TPS without sacrificing decentralization. This was made possible through its proprietary consensus protocol dubbed as the Proof-of-Believability (PoB) that randomizes consensus participants, increasing the number of possible users participating in consensus activity which deters the probability of collusion that may lead to a cartel-like environment. In our final series of IOST Comparison, we look at how IOST interoperate with another blockchain network.
Aside from offering a very fast and guaranteed decentralized blockchain, it offers its users an easy to use and human-readable account/wallet address. While other projects rely on third party domain name services for human-readable addresses, IOST offers it out of the box. There aren’t many blockchains out there that have this feature and those that have it may have limited capabilities associated with their blockchain project. EOS as limitations on its resource allocation model, Steem, on the other hand, has not released their smart contract platform despite being late for over a year now.
Research and development have always been strong characteristics of the IOST Project. It does not rely on acquisition to buy or borrow technology. They have highly competent in-house blockchain engineers that can develop innovative solutions to prevailing blockchain challenges. They are able to design a very scalable, decentralized and secure blockchain and release it months ahead of its scheduled launch. Moreover, as recognition of IOST’s efforts in blockchain technology advancement, it has been recognized as one of the “Top 20 Emerging Innovative Enterprises in 2019.”
IOST is all about inclusivity, decentralization, censorship resistance and giving what the users and developers need to experience the full benefits of blockchain technology in a timely manner. There are able to do this with an extremely talented development team and led by highly technical and accomplished management that do not only understand the business side of the project but also its highly technical aspects. This very potent combination makes them one of the projects to watch out for as they continue to push the envelope of this emerging technology.
Despite having a very competent in-house team of developers the IOST management did not forget the value of partnering with other blockchain projects. This can be seen early on IOST’s development when they were seen collaborating with different distributed ledger technology (DLT) and crypto-related organization. In fact, the IOS foundation in collaboration with Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and KPMG Digital Village, has initiated a contest where they asked the developer community for an interoperability solution of IOST.
Develops were tasked to create a seamless data bridge for IOST where information, transactions, and asset values can be easily transferred between IOST and ETH or any other blockchains. The main aim of this initiative is to find an interoperability solution that will enable IOST users with unprecedented flexibility and freedom by allowing them to transfer information and exchange value directly with other blockchains. If successful IOST assets owners will not be bounded or limited to IOST blockchain and will have the ability to move their assets in whatever supported blockchains in the interoperability solution.
We were able to get hold of one of the developer participants, Second Impact (IOST-Q.E.D), to share with us some information about their entry. Since the winner has not been chosen yet the developer holds off revealing any technical details about their proposed solution and instead pointed us to a public blog-post where they shared a high-level overview of their solution. According to their Medium post, they have developed Crosshcain, a purpose-built tool that has a special account called “mediator” which is able to receive a request from users of other blockhain platforms and call the IOST Blockchain’s Contract function.
The first blockchain platform they supported for their solution is Klaytn. It is a relatively new blockchain platform developed by Ground X, a subsidiary of South Korean technology giant Kakao. According to Second Impact, they chose Klaytn due to the prospect of onboarding Kakaotalk users into the IOST dapps space. Judging from the number of users of KakaoTalk, which is said to have reached around 220 Million members in 2017 with around 59 million active monthly users, they have made the right call. Moreover, the team discloses that Klaytn is like a fork of Ethereum with a faster consensus mechanism which seems to imply an easy Ethereum integration in the future.
The support of the Klaytn Blockchain seems to also suggest that the team gives utmost importance to mainstream adoption. We believe this approach is a better strategy to grow the dapps space and make it more popular. New dapp users coming from outside the industry is of very importance to grow the industry and increase awareness about them. Furthermore, the dev team also revealed that they will be creating an IOST-Ethereum Crosschain in the future. If successful IOST will become a second-layer solution for the Ethereum network.
Conclusion
As the blockchain industry grows and matures the importance of interoperability also increases. For the whole industry to thrive, there should be an active effort by industry participants to work together to achieve the common goal of bringing blockchain technology to the masses. The growth of the industry can only be achieved expanding outwards, instead of trying to wrestle from each other dapp market share projects must all be working together to onboard new users in the space and this is much easier to achieve if they leverage each other’s strengths and resources.
This is easier said than done due to the highly competitive nature of the industry, but we believe that by working together projects will be able to bring more value to its users in less amount of time and resources. More importantly, they can accelerate the outward expansion of the industry and ultimately may lead to mass adoption significantly increasing utilization of their platform and the different digital assets they support.
We are excited to see that IOST is taking the steps to make interoperability a reality in their platform and based on what they have said in the contest, is planning to execute interoperability functionality in their codebase. The willingness of the IOST team to collaborate with community developers as well as other blockchain projects will foster inclusive growth and opens the possibility of IOST partnering with interoperability projects such as Cosmos and Polkadot. When this happens other blockchains will be able to leverage the scalability power of IOST without having to sacrifice decentralization and security.
Finally, those blockchain projects that are willing and technically able to make their blockchains interoperable would benefit immensely in terms of maximizing performance, use, and market share. Through interoperability, other projects will not need to find scalability solutions for their dapps they can just piggy-back ride on IOST’s highly-scalable network. IOST, on the other hand, will increase the utility of its token as well as its popularity. Scalable, decentralized, secure and interoperable, these are all the features IOST will strive to completely achieve in the near future, making it the most complete blockchain platform.