The next game-changing trend in the blockchain world is public chain. There are three critical components in the development of blockchain — public chain as the infrastructure of the blockchain world, solution as an extension of public chain, and application as marketable products or services.
Public chain lays the groundwork for blockchain applications. In other words, only the public chain project which takes the lead in the competitive market will control the access/entry to the blockchain world.
DxChain, a Silicon Valley-based public chain project which bills itself as the world’s first public chain for storage and computation, aims to be the Hadoop in the blockchain world.
So what is DxChain’s core competence?
DxChain: Filecoin 2.0
Developers have recognized blockchain’s technological bottlenecks — high latency in transactions, and limits to the amount of computation and data storage. Therefore, many developers turn to public chains. 80 percent of them are devoted to the problem of high latency.
However, they have not come up with an appropriate solution that can provide computing services based on big data and machine learning in the environment of distributed data storage and computation. Says Allan Zhang, founder of DxChain, “Blockchain world is lack of real infrastructure.”
In fact, the most successful blockchain applications — Bitcoin and Ethereum — have exposed bottlenecks in storage and computation. Bitcoin is mainly used for financial transfer, which involves little in storage and computation. Ethereum can only deal with a limited amount of computation as the current smart contracts only include some primary functions.
While investors have pumped heavy investments into the blockchain startups, technical bottlenecks are preventing these projects from reaching their full potential in industries beyond money transfer and information tracking of logistics.
Today, blockchain projects which focus on storage and computation are in hot demand in the market. For example, Filecoin, a decentralized storage network built heavily on IPFS, wowed the world last year by raising $252 million, the biggest ICO in the history of the blockchain. It allows users to rent extra storage, earn Filecoin, and exchange it for other cryptos or fiat. Its creator Juan Benet has an ambitious plan of building an indefinite storage space.
Meanwhile, Dfinity creates a decentralized network whose protocols can generate a reliable “virtual computer” running on top of a peer-to-peer upon which software can install and operate in the tamper-proof mode of smart contracts. The ultimate goal of Dfinity is enabling decentralized public networks to host a virtual computer of unlimited capacity.
These projects are expanding the possibilities of blockchain applications, but storage and computation can hardly be separated. Amazon Web Services, for example, provides both storage capacity and high-performance computing services. The blockchain is no exception.
DxChain wants to break the bottleneck of storage and computation. Inspired by Filecoin, DxChain splits an uploaded file into small pieces, randomly distributing them on different mining machines, and storing them on their respective blockchains. This method can fully take advantage of unused hard drive resources.
On July 12, DxChain officially released its MVP, which showcases DxChain’s blockchain storage capability as promised. MVP, which stands for Minimum Viable Product, is a development technique in which a new product or website is developed with sufficient features to satisfy early adopters.
DxChain believes only one chain cannot meet the demand for storage, computation, and privacy. So it adds data side chain and computation side chain in a way akin to Lightning Network. The master chain runs smart contracts and manages the data chain and computation chain.
The three-chain design is called “chains-on-chain.” Unlike Filecoin, DxChain enables computation in its blockchains. The computing chain is used for parallel computing applications to process large volumes of data, which eventually powers machine learning and business intelligence.
Hadoop in blockchain world
DxChain’s state-of-the-art “Chains-on-chain” is inspired by Hadoop, a collection of open-source software utilities developed by Apache Software Foundation.
Over the past decade, Hadoop has addressed the issue of distributed storage of data within an organization or a company. However, to realize the distributed storage, the problem of achieving trust between different organizations and participants remain unsolved.
Today’s blockchain technology provides the perfect solution. DxChain is built on Hadoop’s forte, which has been validated in industries over the past decade. By integrating Hadoop with blockchain, DxChain can eventually solve the problems of distributed storage and computation and provide big data computing in a decentralized environment.
Wei Wang, DxChain CTO, says DxChain hopes to be the Hadoop at the age of blockchain — providing the most stable and universal decentralized storage and computation solution.
DxChain ecosystem scenario
1. Artificial Intelligence
AI is shaping our lives in myriad areas, such as advertising, finance, medical care, transport, consumer, automation, energy, logistics, and aerospace. DxChain can benefit AI vendors, allowing developers to create their machine learning-based Dapps using the DxChain platform.
2. Smart City
Smart City is a type of intelligent solution that uses different kinds of electronic data collection sensors to supply information which is used to manage assets and resources efficiently. By 2020, the market value of smart city will reach US$1.565 trillion. DxChain users can perform machine learning and data analysis based on the collected data from sensors, and generate business intelligence report to guide their decision-making process.
3. Healthcare
IoT has brought some significant developments in the healthcare and medical sectors. The healthcare services based on smart devices can provide on-the-diagnostics for patients who cannot visit the hospital. DxChain can build its big data and machine learning platform to lower costs.
“If a public chain is used for minor repairs, its application scenarios could be very limited. The valuable public chain should be developed based on data storage and computation. Therefore, the new generation of public chains must be able to solve storage and computation problems, which is the only direction of blockchain technology development,” says Wang.
In conclusion, DxChain provides a data trading platform for those who want to sell data. Its big data analytics and machine learning computing will make data usage more accessible and more flexible, a shared goal of decentralization.
