VMWare Blockchain Project Concord Looks for Better Scaling and Energy Efficiency

VMWare's Open-Source Blockchain Project: Claims to Have Better Scalability

VMWare, a company which specializes in cloud computing and virtualization announced on Tuesday that it has officially developed an open-source blockchain infrastructure which is designed to be both scalable and energy efficient.

Referred to as Project Concord, VMWare's blockchain strives to provide a strong base for blockchain implementations that are capable of solving certain scaling issues that blight the likes of Ethereum, all by modifying the Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus algorithm which is commonly found in most blockchain networks.

Guy Golan, a senior researcher for the company wrote in its blog that the project's bespoke algorithm uses a different procedure for communication than occur within existing consensus protocols, that “exploits optimism to provide a common case fast-path execution” and utilizes new cryptographic algorithms.

These upgrades from current protocols allow for a higher network throughput, he said.

Operating as a subsidiary organization under the international company, Dell, VMWare has been working on Project Concord for roughly two years, and while it has committed to extensive research, which has gone on to be published over the last couple of months, this weeks announcement and subsequent release marks the first time that the company has acknowledged in public, just how much work has gone into developing this new blockchain infrastructure.

“Project Concord's foundations stem from years of academic and industrial research on Byzantine Fault Tolerant replication, cryptography and distributed computing,” Gueta said, going on to further comment:

“The cryptocurrency revolution and, in particular, bitcoin and ethereum have also tremendously influenced our understanding of this emerging field of trust decentralization. The Project Concord library is designed to be used as a core building block for replicated distributed data stores and is thus especially suited to serve as the basis for highly scalable, permissioned enterprise blockchain systems.”

The team has already made it widely apparent that the source code is available, with its source code being published to Github quite recently, with Gueta stating that the company has every intention of adding a number of new features as the project moves forward.

Among all of these, Gueta stated referred to one example, this being the execution engine for ethereum virtual-machine based smart contracts. With other additions including further support for Windows, Apple's OSX, including some Distributions for Linux, as previously listed on the Github of Project Concord.

The Github page adds that the team “welcomes contributions from the community,” though contributors will be required to sign a license agreement.