MIT builds the virtual currency 'Vault' capable of 100 times faster and more efficient transactions of bit coins

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) research team announced " Vault " as "faster and more efficient virtual currency". Vault has reduced the amount of data required for trading verification compared with the traditional virtual currency by up to 99%, it is designed to be able to trade much more efficiently and to easily enter new entrants.

Vault: Fast Bootstrapping for Cryptocurrencies
(PDF file) http://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/leung-vault-eprint.pdf

A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency | MIT News
http://news.mit.edu/2019/vault-faster-more-efficient-cryptocurrency-0124

In the virtual currency such as bit coins, transaction data is recorded and referred to on a network distributed ledger called "block chain". Each block contains a position in the timestamp · block chain · a fixed number of character sequences called "hash" etc. By being managed not by an organization like a bank but by the entire network by the user, security with high falsification tolerance is guaranteed.

However, because new entrants need to download all transaction data from hundreds of thousands of block chains, diversification of the ledger directly leads to scalability problems. For example, the number of bit coin accounts has already exceeded 22 million, and the number of blocks in the block chain seems to exceed 500,000 blocks as of 2018, so the total of the data downloaded by new users is about 150 GB It is said that. As the volume of data to be handled becomes enormous, new entrants will not only become extremely difficult, but the time it takes to verify the transaction and the required processing capacity will also increase drastically.

MIT researchers announced Vault is a virtual currency that allows users to join the network by simply downloading some of all transaction data. Vault is built with the new block chain platform " Algorand " underlined. Algorand was invented by MIT's computer scientist Silvio Micali to solve the traditional block chain trilemma that "it can not cover all three of" decentralization "," security "and" scalability " It was.

On the Vault platform you need to download and store a small portion of all transaction data, but when a new user joins Vault, there are only a maximum of 1000 blocks to download. According to researchers, when new users join, the initial block approval information is synchronized with the 1000th block, so that most of the block verification can be omitted.

In addition, I designed Vault with a method called "sharding method" in order to reduce the amount of data. In this method, in order to share transaction data throughout the network, the transaction data itself is divided into fine shards (fragments). Each user saves the account balance in the assigned shard and route hash, and when verifying the transaction of the part not held by the user, it follows the path to the common layer and carries out the verification. This means that only a small amount of data is required for individual users to process in order to verify the transaction.

In addition, in many virtual currencies, accounts left unused with zero balance are one of the major reasons for the increase in data capacity. On the other hand, Vault has designed a new scheme to recognize and delete accounts of users whose balance is zero for a certain period of time, eliminating the need to verify unnecessary accounts and cutting the loss of transaction verification.

In fact, when the researchers compared and verified the bandwidth of the virtual currency network, Vault succeeded in reducing 99% compared with bit coin and by 90% compared to the most efficient virtual currency, He said that. Even though it has been reduced to that extent, the research team reports that Vault verifies transactions on all nodes and ensures strong security as well as existing virtual currencies.

As for the origin named "Vault", Derek Leung, one of the research team and belonging to MIT's CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), said, "The title of the paper" Vault "is funny, It's like a vault where you can save money and users newly entering the block chain can vault the block verification. "