Types of Blockchain Technology


The world of Blockchain technology is a very exciting one. The rapid advance of blockchain technology is felt throughout our daily lives. Nowadays, Blockchain technologies are headlines. Many of us often get confused about what types of technologies there are and how are these technologies different from each other.
So today, let’s talk about various types of blockchains we are using.

1.     Ethereum

Ethereum is an open-source decentralized shared blockchain platform for building completely synchronous and secure applications as well as cryptocurrencies.  Ethereum is considered to be one of the pioneer platforms in distributed ledger and blockchain technology. Ethereum provides a decentralized Turing-complete virtual machine, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which can execute scripts using the global network of peers. Ethereum was proposed in late 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, a cryptocurrency researcher and programmer. Ether (ETH) is a cryptocurrency developed by Ethereum Foundation whose price as of today is $866 and total numbers of coins present are about 98 Million.

Bitcoin vs. Ethereum:

Parameters
Bitcoin
Ethereum
Launch year
2009
2013
Current price
$10920
$945
Founder
Satoshi Nakamoto (unknown)
Vitalik Buterin and team
Average block time
(time required to mine a block)
10 Minutes
15 Seconds
Total coin supply
21 Million
98 Million
Mining hardware required
Specialized, like ASIC
GPUs
Market share
No.1 ($185,253,851,538)
No. 2 ($92,672,985,389)
Function
Digital currency
Smart contract platform
Turing completeness
No
Yes


2.     Hyperledger

Just to make things clear, the Hyperledger project is an incubation project for different Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) by the Linux Foundation. Hyperledger Fabric is an implementation currently being done by IBM.

  • Fabric

The fabric is essentially a private version of the blockchain, in which the nodes in the network form a private chain and share the data. This blockchain is being primarily used by enterprises for conducting POCs. Fabric is an open-source protocol and developers can contribute to the development. Currently, it has three main modules — Membership services, blockchain services and chaincode services. Membership services are the place where any new member has to register while joining the network. This acts as a Certificate Authority (CA) and maintains and blacklists the different nodes. Blockchain services have the consensus module, the actual ledger service, and the P2P protocol. The chaincode services module contains the “chaincode”, which are Smart Contracts in dockerized containers.

3.     R3’s Corda




Corda is an implementation of the Distributed Ledger Technology developed by a company called R3. Corda is made specifically for financial applications. It is a synchronous communication without a need to validate those transactions again and again whenever something changes on either side, and without the interference of intruders and eavesdropping. While they were developing it independently earlier, they became a part of the Hyperledger project later on.
“We don’t have blocks and we don’t have a chain”
-Tim Grant, CEO, R3 Lab and Research Centre
In Corda, there is a concept of state changes and transactions instead of blocks and a chain. Corda aims to achieve much more scalability and address the privacy concerns that are required by banks and other financial institutions by including “Notaries” in their network. Notaries essentially perform the function of miners, but without the overhead of performing expensive Proof-of-Work algorithms. They validate all the transactions and only once its timestamped by a notary; it can be included in the immutable chain. Notaries can either be centralized (e.g. R3 nodes themselves or Central banks) or they can be distributed.
According to their documentation, this ledger is specifically meant for financial applications, and all other non-financial applications are outside the scope.







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