Ethereum, OmiseGO, Plasma & Hydro Pay – Hydro Labs
At the time of writing, etherscan.io reports that Ethereum has a transaction rate of 10.4 TPS (transactions per second), whilst Bitcoin has a sluggish 3.6 TPS (blockchain.com). The Ethereum network is one of the preferred blockchain platforms for developers and the crypto community according to state of the dApps. Unique features such as immutable smart contracts and easy to learn programming language make it one of the most robust blockchain platforms to build on. Along with the large infrastructure of the Ethereum community and its developers, these features could lead crypto towards mass adoption; however the issue of scalability still remains a bottleneck for usage and payments. This is in comparison to centralized enterprises such as Visa, whose payment processing network can handle up to more than 24,000 transactions per second (Visa website, 2019).
The open-source protocol identity layer, Hydro, which is currently being built by Hydro Labs, is built on top of Ethereum as a layer-2. We are constantly looking for improvements that benefit the entire Hydro ecosystem, which is why it was decided to strategically partner with OmiseGO and implement Plasma into our payments & remittance solution ‘Hydro Pay’.
OmiseGO is a global blockchain platform for open financial services. Built using enterprise-grade financial infrastructure, OmiseGO grants consumers access to financial services, investing capabilities, secondary markets, and opportunities to spend their digital assets anywhere.
The OmiseGO decentralized exchange was designed in anticipation of Plasma which will utilize Plasma to support a scalable, fully on-chain exchange without sacrificing security (Knott, 2018).
Scalability is a paramount issue in today’s current blockchain technology, and this has to be solved in order for cryptocurrencies to be a feasible solution to problems going forward. Ethereum is undoubtedly secure in executing smart contracts and transactions, but this comes along with redundant inefficiencies in computational executions. One solution proposed by Joseph Poon and Vitalik Buterin, called Plasma, a layer 2 scaling solution, proposes to use Child Chains to report to the Root Chains and increase the efficiency of the network without jeopardizing security. Layer 2 simply means that it is built on top of Ethereum without altering the existing rules of the ethereum network.
According to the Plasma whitepaper,
“Plasma is a proposed framework for incentivized and enforced execution of smart contracts which is scalable to a significant amount of state updates per second (potentially billions) enabling the blockchain to be able to represent a significant amount of decentralized financial applications worldwide.
These smart contracts are incentivized to continue operation autonomously via network transaction fees, which is ultimately reliant upon the underlying blockchain (e.g. Ethereum) to enforce transactional state transitions (Poon and Buterin, 2017, p. 1).”
It offers scalability far more superior to that of centralized servers making dApps and DeFi apps a representational use case to that of real-life applications.
After onboarding Liquid Global Exchange as our initial remittance partner, Hydro Labs continues to seek out strategic partners to benefit the Hydro Ecosystem. This includes partnering with OmiseGO in order to implement Plasma into Hydro Pay, creating a seamless way to send payments or remittances. Hydro Pay is projected to disrupt the billion-dollar remittance industry with the lowest fees and instant transactions.
Blockchain is a nascent technology, but the possibilities are vast and endless. Ergo, Hydro Labs hopes to cross as many boundaries to make blockchain as simple and accessible to everyone in the world.
Visa. (2019). Security and reliability, based on testing conducted in August 2010 with IBM. Retrieved from https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business-tools/retail.html.
Knott, D. (2018). Construction of a Plasma Chain 0x1. Retrieved from https://blog.omisego.network/construction-of-a-plasma-chain-0x1-614f6ebd1612.
Poon, J., Buterin, V. (2017). Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts. A working draft of the Plasma whitepaper. Retrieved from https://plasma.io/plasma-deprecated.pdf.
Published at Fri, 25 Oct 2019 13:20:24 +0000
{flickr|100|campaign}