Blockless Blockchain? COTI Advances Mobile Payments With New Cryptocurrency Effort

September 26, 2024         By: Steven Anderson

A blockchain without blocks? That may sound ludicrous on its surface-what’s left, a chain-but it’s actually being worked on right now. COTI recently tipped us off about work on its new Trustchain system, AlphaNet, a tool which should help provide some real help for several major cryptocurrency problems by improving the blockchain by removing the block.

COTI has a long history of developing blockchain operations, as it’s known for developing the first blockchain protocol that was optimized for mobile payments and stable coins. Now, with its new Trustchain system, it can turn its attention toward some of the biggest issues in cryptocurrency. Issues like a lack of stability, high energy consumption, and the cost of transactions have been keeping more than a few merchants out of the cryptocurrency concept, and the release of this Trustchain system could well help.

Previously, many blockchain solutions could only produce a throughput of several transactions per second. That may sound good, but it’s woefully inadequate against what’s actually needed. Trustchain steps up the process to bring in tens of thousands of transactions per second, and that’s much closer to the kind of throughput needed to go mainstream.

Trustchain is built around several proprietary technologies, and COTI has released the code behind the Trustchain for public viewing on Github, which should itself go a long way toward making the Trustchain a trusted technology itself.

We all know that cryptocurrency has a ways to go before it can be a useful part of everyday life. The pace of blockchain technology is far too sluggish, and the costs associated with it are massive. That’s a good chunk of why we don’t see many businesses—beyond a few early adopters like Overstock.com—take it on. There’s too much downside and not enough upside. As the technology improves, however, it becomes more viable to more users and thus more mainstream. Remember, just a couple years ago, most people had never even heard of bitcoin, let alone considered the possibility that they might use it instead of the dollar.

COTI’s system may be a help here, and by improving the pace of payments and reducing the costs associated with same, it certainly can’t do much harm.