The best universities in the US are working together to create their own crypto. Several professors from MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley are working on Unit-e.
Unit-e aims to succeed in what bitcoin is still unable to do: to process thousands of transactions per second.
This project is the first initiative of Distributed Technology Research (DTR), a non-profit foundation supported by Pantera Capital Management LP, where the very best professors collaborate in the field of decentralised technology.
What is Unit-e?
Bitcoin, which today is still the undisputed queen of cryptocurrencies, has not yet reached a global adoption and the main obstacle is the scalability of the network. The network is not able to handle thousands of transactions per second, although the developers are trying to solve the problem with Lightning Network.
Unit-e is supposed to solve the very problems that Bitcoin developers are facing. The network, if the promises will be fulfilled, will be very fast: there is talk of 10,000 operations per second (more than those handled by Visa, about 1700/s) against the 3, at most 7, by Bitcoin and 10-30 by Ethereum.
To achieve these goals the researchers are trying to implement in a clever way the sharding solution (a process whereby each node contains only part of the blockchain).
Unit-e will ensure low latency, very high throughput and will be based on the Proof of Stake consensus algorithm. The developers will implement the best technologies and the most advanced protocols (UTXO snapshot, Dandelion Lite, SegWit).
According to Pramod Viswanath, researcher and professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the team has first studied blockchain technology in order to understand its limits and then started to design Unit-e.
“Bitcoin has shown us that distributed trust is possible but it’s just not scaling at a dimension that could make it a truly global everyday money,” said Viswanath. “It was a breakthrough that has the capacity to change human lives but that won’t happen unless the technology can be scaled up”.
The source code is available on GitHub and the official whitepaper can be found on the website.
