One of the most ambitious projects in crypto appears to be back on track after a series of missteps in 2018/19 left it floundering.

RChain features concurrent, rather than sequential, execution of smart contracts, meaning the platform is at least in theory infinitely scaleable. It also has a storage layer where data such as NFTs can be stored on-chain, rather than simply as metadata.

But when development work fell behind schedule, that had a cascading effect, including the failure of a key partnership with a community-owned music network that was to be built on RChain.

“Last year at this time we were deeply in debt, we were struggling with a lawsuit and we were behind the curve on our feature set delivery,” RChain founder Greg Meredith yesterday told the virtual annual general meeting of the cooperative that governs RChain.

“This year we have climbed out of much of our debt, we have turned the tables on the lawsuit … and our prospects have never looked better,” he said, praising the “heroic” work of the development team and staff that let the project turn things around.
 

Next step third-party validators

The RChain network has been operating since February 2020, although all the nodes that validate transactions have been run by the co-op. The project is looking to upgrade the network soon to allow third-party validators, which will be a crucial test for the network.

Once that occurs and the network is sufficiently decentralised, the co-op will be free to engage with crypto exchanges and seek listings for RChain’s REV tokens.

Meredith told the AGM that the co-op was in talks with two different investors who were keen to invest $30 million in RChain and DAASL, a blockchain-based software-as-a-service company being built on RChain.

The platform’s first offering will be a blockchain advertising solution somewhat similar to Brave Software’s Basic Attention Token (BAT), a privacy-preserving way in which advertisers could reach blockchain users on decentralised applications (dApps).

RChain developers are also testing a marketplace for creating and reselling NFTs, with the image files actually stored on RChain’s RSpace storage layer. (On Ethereum and other smart contract platforms, NFTs are generally tokens with metadata that point to a JPG stored elsewhere). During a recent RChain virtual meeting, a developer was able to easily create an NFT from his phone and list it on the marketplace within minutes.

The marketplace is part of Dappy, a blockchain-based web browser that aims to serve as an alternative to the centralised Domain Name Service (DNS).
 

Infinitely scaleable

Meredith told RChain co-op members yesterday that tests continue to show that RChain gets faster as more nodes are added to the network.

“The idea is that as you add a node and a processor to the node, you’ll get a certain bump in the number of transactions,” he said. “Roughly speaking, it’s about a thousand transactions per second per processor per node, which means that every time you add a node, you’re gonna get an additional thousand transactions per second…

“Obviously, we still have a ton of work to do, but with this data, I think there’s no question that RChain is the most scaleable. There’s not a single blockchain on the planet that offers this type of performance characteristic.”

The author holds RChain tokens.

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