Taxa - Performance, Privacy & Usability for Every Blockchain
Introduction
In a world today where blockchain is the pinnacle of next generation of technology, even the latest and greatest can have issues. With blockchains such as ETH having the ability for anyone to create a smart contract DAPP, it enables a new level of blockchain development freedom that enables even those with the most basic of knowledge to get started quickly. However, in doing so brings its limitations. This was made apart when the Crypto Kitties smart contract launched back on 28 November 2017, it made this issue apparent, very quickly.
The price of a transaction on the ETH blockchain spiked from it’s usually fee of a around $0.10 to upwards of $5 or higher, due to the sheer number of users trying to access and play the DAPP. Most recently, it was in the news that this issue had occurred again, when the exchange ‘Fcoin’ created a competition for users to decide on what coins where to be listed next on the exchange, this caused a flood of transactions from multiple accounts which again resulted in the ETH blockchain network slowing to a halt and the price of a single transaction fee rising from $0.2 to $3.5 in just 48 hours, as we can see from the graph below:
What is Taxa?
Now you’ve understand the issues that existing solutions and blockchains are dealing with, lets look into what Taxa is, and how they are aiming to provide a solution to these issues.
In it’s simplest form, Taxa network is a smart contract platform that is powered by underlying state-of-the-art trusted computing technology. This means that through it’s use of custom smart contracts that are known as ‘Hyper Smart Contracts’ it will provide DAPP owners with a platform that at it’s very core, data-rich, computation-intensive and privacy-preserving. This means if a DAPP grows in popularity like the aforementioned Crypto Kitties or Fcoin, using a combination of software and the state-of-the-art computing power it will be able to handle the load and increases usage that it brings.
In an interview on CoinSpeaker, the co-founder of the project TF Guo, had the following to say about the basis of the idea behind Taxa:
“Taxa is building a universal logic layer to process blockchain business logic with privacy, performance and developability for all the public blockchains and DApps. Together with storage layers like IPFS, oracle solutions like Chainlink, inter-chain mediators like Polkadot, Taxa complements the important, difficult yet less tapped middleware of blockchain.”
The great thing about Taxa Network is that anyone can contribute to the computing power on the Taxa network, the only requirements are that the hardware they are hosting needs to be running with a modern processor.
Using this hardware, it means that users are able to host nodes on the blockchain that will deal with the processing power requirements and needs of any DAPP that is hosted on the chain.
Using a process known as TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) it ensures that any data is stored in a secure environment and contained, so that even the operator of the node is unable to access the data and information that passed through and is stored within it. On top of ensuring that the data is secured, Taxa Network has enabled a consensus-based algorithm which has the ability to essentially ‘Mute’ any nodes that are either faulty and not providing the level of service expected of them from the ecosystem. This ensures that those who ‘behave’ or provide a high level of uptime and data processing are rewarded for doing so, while those nodes that are not relaying data or have a sufficient uptime are punished and muted from the ecosystem.
The above chart shows an overview of the architecture of the Taxa Network. From it, we can see that the network is split into three different layers; Client, public blockchain and Execution layer. Let’s take a quick look into each of the layers, and what their purpose in the network is.
Client Layer: The Taxa Network allows users to be able to embed the Taxa SDK into their DAPP’s, or it gives them the option to launch the Taxa client, this will then invoke of the custom ‘Hyper Smart Contracts’ which will carry out the computation power and data processing that their DAPP requires.
Public Blockchain Layer: The Taxa network will be setting up and deploying several smart contacts on the public facing blockchain of network, these will handle the network related tasks such as handling of the transactions ands payment settlements. It will also enable the smart contacts to be able to invoke one of the networks Hyper Smart Contracts’ to deal with an increase in load if the blockchain network starts to become overloaded, and transactions slow down.
Trusted Execution Layer: As mentioned above, the Trusted Execution Environment is the section of the network that deals with ensuring that all data that passes through any node is secure and cannot be intercepted by any of the node owners. This section of the network will handle requests and tasks assigned to it from the public blockchain layer mentioned above. This will establish a secure connection from point A to point B. All successful connections between users handled in this section will be passed back to the public blockchain layer.
Core features
The Taxa network has built itself with four main core features in mind; Performance, Privacy, Reliability and Developability.
Performance: Using a combination of it’s custom made ‘Hyper Smart Contracts’ and the high-performance hardware that will make up the nodes on the network, they will be able to provide a platform that is able to perform complex tasks and handle vast loads.
Privacy: The setup of the network ensures that the Trusted Execution Environment provides a secure and private method of transmitting data across the blockchain while concealing the DAPP’s private details from the blockchain and the nodes.
Reliability: The nodes on the network are all subject to the consensus algorithm that ensures that any faulty or unreliable nodes are muted from the network, while rewarding nodes that provide a high level of service. This ensures that the network is always running at optimal performance.
Developability: using a combination of general-purpose programming languages ensures that the Taxa network will be able to provide a solution that is easy for the industry to pick up and start working on with their pre-existing knowledge.
Careers
Have a background in blockchain and want to become part of the team, or simply looking to get your foot in the door of a new project? Taxa are currently looking to expand their team with an additional three people; If you have experience in any of the following roles; Cloud and Solutions Architect, Marketing manager, People operations Generalist. And believe you have what it takes, you can apply for the roles, here: https://angel.co/taxanetwork/jobs
Social media
If you’ve like to know more about the project, or want to checkout any of their social media channels, you can find the links to them, below:
Website - https://taxa.network
Twitter - https://twitter.com/taxanetwork
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/taxanetwork/
Telegram - https://t.me/taxanetwork
AngelList - https://angel.co/taxanetwork