Thunder Core - A Faster Ethereum?

ThunderCore promises to become a scalable blockchain that enables mass adoption of dApps. In the following, I will have a closer look at this upcoming project seeking to become at least twice as fast as Zilliqa.

Thunder Token Review

Thunder™ aims to become a secure, high-performance blockchain. Thanks to its full compatibility with Ethereum smart contracts, dApps can be migrated to Thunder, which allows them to significantly and immediately increase their performance. The proposed scalability enables transactions to be confirmed almost instantly within less than a second. This can be accomplished by adding a so-called “fast-path” that is situated on top of the standard blockchain ("slow-chain"). If the fast path is congested for whatever reason, transactions will fall back to the slow chain to secure that the network remains functional.

The problem

Financial and other transactions are currently being conducted by centralized entities, for instance VISA. Cryptocurrencies such as BTC and ETH have ignited the vision of a more decentralized system that provides a higher transparency, fairness, and security. However, current approaches in this area struggle with scalability and low throughput. For example, only one dApp (Cryptokitties) was enough to take a heavy toll on the Ethereum network, resulting in significantly increased transaction fees and very high confirmation times. The reason for this lies in the fact that major cryptocurrencies are flooding their whole network with all the transactions of the chain.

The solution

Thunder seeks to build a bridge between a centralized and decentralized network that can utilize the best of both worlds. As such, it seeks to create a fully decentralized blockchain that is able to leverage the performance of centralized systems. They initially plan to use Ethereum’s blockchain as the underlying slow chain of the network. This means that they consider the existing speed and throughput of ETH as super slow. Later scalability is accomplished by allowing others to create dedicated Accelerators.

The team believes that Thunder "is the simplest, fastest, most expressive and secure blockchain solution out there".

Such a bold claim stemming from credible and experienced scientists should not be underestimated. (One of their team members co-wrote the very first academic research paper on BTC.)

The increased speed can be accomplished by using Accelerators designed to bundle transactions into micro-blocks. Once such a micro-block that contains numerous transactions is confirmed, all the transactions that are contained within the block are considered as confirmed. This solution prevents the entire network from being flooded by all transactions of the chain. Even more so, the confirmation of a transaction will only require two communication rounds.

Competitor analysis

Thunder's proposed solution combines an asynchronous fast path with a fallback. Competitors such as Zilliqa utilize classic consensus methods with an asynchronous recovery path. Classical solutions are more prone to corruption and require more voting rounds, which makes them less fast. Even more so, they are more difficult to implement and to deploy on a large scale.

Instead of completely redesigning the consensus model, Thunder simply seeks to accelerate existing blockchains.

• Scaling solutions such as the Lightning Network provide no smart contract support. ETH's Casper will allow offchain voting without improving speed
• Zilliqa's & Algorand's model can only withstand less than 33% of corruption. The latter also requires a remodeling of the consensus layer
• DAG-based approaches do not provide smart contract support. At the same time, it is possible that DAGs could once become the closest competitors in terms of transaction throughput
• Dfinity does not increase throughput

Team analysis

• Only 4 team members listed on website; based on LinkedIn we can estimate that their team is in between 15 to 20 people.
• Listed team members are top-notch; great balance between engineers, scientists and experienced founders / business owners
• CEO founded a gaming company and sold it for over $500 million to Disney

Investors

• George Lambeth (formerly ConsenSys)
• Jason Zhang (Neutral Project)
• Weishen Qiu (AlphaCoin Fund)
• Kingsley Advani (Chainfund Capital)
• Ofer Rotem
• BMAN Lee (Metropolis VC)
• Ron Sade (TLVC - Tel Aviv Capital)
• Phil Harris (Topo AI)

Pros

• 2x faster than Zilliqa.
• Ability to accomplish high throughput and fast confirmation times
• Support of both EVM-smart contracts as well as EVM-DApps that are designed for Ethereum. This aspect is quite considerable and it would allow ETH dApp-creators to switch to Thunder with little or even no modifications
• Increase of the corruption rate from 33% to 50% of the PBFT
• Viable solutions to the ETH scaling problem (for instance Casper) are not yet integrated. The development of these solutions could take years to implement
• Scientific approach of the team is balanced by the business experience of the CEO
• Ian Balina is bullish on the project

Cons

• No detailed transaction speeds specified
• Severe competition in the area of highly scalable block chains. Compared to other projects, they are a little late
• The quick development and introduction of Casper could reduce the dependency on solutions such as Thunder
• Little to no hype, severely below the radar as it does not have a public ICO
• No roadmap on website
• No advisors and investors specified on website
• According to Ian Balina there's a one-year lock up period
• No specified hard cap
• Not specified how the raised amount will be used (development, marketing, etc.)
• Not specified how they intend to build a community around this project

Verdict

Thunder is a unique solution to a big problem in the crypto sphere. Compared to competitors, the approach provides a higher transaction speed while maintaining smart contract support. The success of Thunder will largely depend on the team members ability to build a community around the project. Similarly, only time can tell whether they are able to translate their academic approach into a viable real-world solution. From the information available, this project is very interesting.

This is not financial advice. I'm just sharing my opinion. Always do your own research.