MastersOfNodes.com — SideChain and Decentralized applications
One of the most interesting use cases for blockchains is certainly decentralized applications. Reference in this area, the Ethereum protocol aims to offer an alternative to Bitcoin, allowing the creation of secure and self-executing computer programs often called smart contracts, or “smart contracts”. However, beyond the attractive marketing promises of blockchains 2.0, the reality is more sober. Currently the Ethereum network can handle only about 15 transactions per second and experiences problems of congestion more and more frequent. Faced with these problems of scaling up the Ethereum network, namely the famous problem of “scalability” that affects a lot of protocols, the advent of technology “sidechains” offers interesting prospects.
A sidechain is a secondary blockchain attached to a main blockchain. It has its own characteristics, but benefits from the community and security inherent in the main network for the final transactions that will be listed on the main blockchain (also called ChildChains). Technically, several sidechains independent of each other can be deployed around the same main blockchain. In fact, theoretically, many decentralized applications, the DApps, can operate on sidechains independent of each other. Thus, the load of each sidechain does not impact the speed of operations on the main blockchain.
A sidechain makes it possible to increase the volume of data processed on a decentralized network by offloading part of the operations listed in the mother blockchain towards sidechains, and thus considerably improve the scalability of the network. But this is not his only advantage.
The sidechains also allow the experimentation of new features that would be considered too risky to be deployed on the main network. Indeed, a bug or a hack that would affect a sidechain would not affect the main blockchain, nor even the other sidechains of the network, since they are all independent of each other. On the other hand, if the mother blockchain is compromised, the sidechains may be affected as well. Therefore, it is better to conduct sensitive experiments on sidechains rather than directly on the mother blockchain.
The sideschains also open new possibilities in terms of interoperability. Their infrastructure allows them to have a parallel computing capability, rather than executing the transactions one after another as Ethereum does. Ark or Lisk can scale the computing power of different sidechains inside a single side chain. An impressive potential if we imagine a possible interoperability between several thousand sidechains.
Interoperability is a key element in the development of many decentralized applications that require a wide range of information from multiple infrastructures. The need for new technologies allowing an efficient transfer of information from one blockchain to another makes the sidechain architecture very interesting.
Want to know more about sidechains? Visit mastersofnodes.com to read the full article.
Published at Thu, 02 Jan 2020 10:56:10 +0000
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