MIT Researchers to Present Highly Efficient Cryptocurrency That Could Become the ‘Bitcoin Killer’

According to a recent report, MIT scientists are going to present a new cryptocurrency called Vault that will blow today’s flagship cryptocurrencies out of the water. Vault will require 99 percent less bandwidth in order to join the network compared to Bitcoin, the number one currency on the market.

A more efficient currency

The researchers claim that the brand-new coin, which is going to be revealed next month, will only require a miniscule fraction of the transaction data. At the same time, despite a huge spike in efficiency, Vault will still ensure top-notch security on par with its well-known competitors. Derek Leung, one of the developers, states that the main goal of the new currency is to address the scalability pain points and make it accessible to the general public.

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Ditching PoW

While Bitcoin is based on the energy-consuming Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm, the MIT team decided to opt for Proof-of-Stake (PoS). That subsequently resulted in the reduction of block verification time. Instead of verifying blocks, users have to validate certificates. On top of that, they also match a new ‘breadcrumb’ block with 1,000 blocks ahead of it, which also speeds up transactions.  

The reduction of the data storage was achieved with the help of sharding (blockchain is divided into unique partitions). The technique was implemented with the help of a hash tree (Merkle tree), which makes data more manageable by creating a network of children nodes.

Recently, U.Today also shed light on a ‘think tank’ of professors from top US universities (including MIT) that are going to launch the Unit-e coin, which is expected to become the fastest currency on the market.