ICO Preview: Taraxa (Part 1)

Unfortunately this isn't going to be a full review. I don't have a sneak peek at their GitHub repo and their full whitepaper. I will update and republish as I get more information.

What is Taraxa

Taraxa aims to "democratize Internet-of-Things (IoT)" data. On their website the project will achieve this with infinitely-scalable concurrent contracts, trustless light nodes, and encrypted data markets on top of block lattice. These words are directly from their site. The technology will be based on Nano (formerly known as RaiBlocks) and its lattice structure. If you are unfamiliar with Nano let's do a recap since Taraxa's foundation starts there. But first, let's look at the team.

The Team

• Steven Pu, Founder: IoT and healthcare entrepreneur, strategy consultant; LinkSens, EviPath, Monitor Deloitte; Stanford University BS & MS in EE
• Vikram Saraph, Concurrency: Distributed computing, software concurrency, Ethereum hacker; Facebook; Brown University PhD candidate in CS
• Dr. Ilja Honkonen, Ledger: Distributed computing, space weather modeling, Ethereum & IOTA hacker; NASA, Finnish Meteorological Institute; University of Helsinki PhD in Physics.
• Professor Paul Gazzillo, Virtual Machine: Programming languages, security, systems; Google, Bloomberg, University of Central Florida; New York University PhD in CS.
• Willem Wyndham, Virtual Machine, Storage, Reputation: Programming languages, compilers, security, WebAssembly and Bitcoin hacker; IBM; University of Maryland PhD candidate in CS.
• Dr. Justin Snapp, Hardware: Analog IC design, microfabricated vacuum electronics, IoT enthusiast; Intersil, Qualcomm; Stanford University BS & MS & PhD in EE.
• Chris Dai, Business Development and Partnerships: Entrepreneur and blockchain investor; Leland Capital, Longhash Japan, blockchain incubator; Stanford University BS in MS&E.

Incorporated in the Cayman Islands with designs to incorporate in Switzerland, Japan, and other countries as necessary.

A Refresher on Nano

A network offering instant fee-less and miner-less transactions. Instead of a blockchain it uses a lattice. Compared to Bitcoin, Nano's transactions are not stored in the mempool (queue) waiting for a miner to pick up the transaction and add it to a block. Nano differs in that each address/account has its own blockchain. The lattice structure comes from the interconnected blockchains. When an account creates a transaction that record is then stored on a block in that account's blockchain. Sending funds from one account to another would record a send transaction in the sender's blockchain and the receiver would have to create a receiver transaction in their blockchain. The criss-crossing lines of send and receive transactions between chains create a latticed mesh pattern. This structure differs from Bitcoin in that Nano's transactions are asynchronous and handled between the two parties transacting. Transactions on Bitcoin must wait for the entire network to validate the transaction. I mentioned above that Nano is miner-less but that is not exactly true. There is a simpler (than Bitcoin) Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm that the network miners use to validate blocks. Solving this puzzle is much faster than in Bitcoin and gives the illusion of instant transactions.

How are they different

Full whitepaper is not released for public consumption

Unfortunately the full whitepaper is not released for public consumption. The team is still actively working on several key components of their project. Here is my question to the admins in their Telegram chat.

Block Lattice from Nano

Taraxa's core protocol is based on Nano (formerly RaiBlocks) lattice technology. To date, there is no formal link between Taraxa and Nano.

Smart Contracts on Taraxa

Taraxa claims their smart contract achieves high throughput because of two primary reasons: 1) single nodes are able to process hundreds of smart contract calls simultaneously, and 2) the ability to break up smart contract processing tasks to reduce wasted work. The second point is vital in comparison to Proof-of-Work protocols especially. With Bitcoin and Ethereum, all miners are working to produce blocks but ultimately one wins and confirms the newest block. All the other miners (n-1) generated work that was redundant and wasted. With Taraxa, once a miner runs a smart contract that node is the sole block producer and thus reduces waste and makes for high speed output.

Smart contract parallel calls

Virtual machine (VM)

Differentiating itself from Ethereum, Taraxa chooses to leverage existing, battle tested technologies. Creating new languages such as Solidity leave the network vulnerable to a wide range of unknown attacks at the time of the technology's development. Taraxa's VM stack is based on WebAssembly (WASM) to enable executing code nearly as fast as running native machine code. WASM is supported by a wide host of mature languages incuding C and C++. Other projects I have covered such as Ontology have used Wagon for WASM since their platform is written in Go. WASM is built on mature technologies such as asm.js and supported by blue chip firms such as Google and Microsoft.

Ongoing business developements

Taraxa is currently in serious conversations to become the primary public ledger for CarBlock.io. Additionally, they are progressing through conversations with agriculture businesses in Western China to create a public ledger to capture farming equipment sensor data. Please note I use the word conversation since the protocol is still in active development. Once the team launches their testnet they an start rolling up their sleeves for the two conversations mentioned.

Token Metrics

• What stage is Taraxa in now: Currently in private sale but currently oversubscribed
• No pools: Will not be working with pools (no surprise there!)
• Token standard: TBD. Considering ERC-20 before swapping into their native mainnet.
• Total supply: There will eventually be 2⁵³ -1 tokens, or 9,007,199,254,740,991 tokens

Sources

1. Taraxa FAQ