An epic drama of adventure and exploration. When we look back at this period of time, I wonder what words we’ll use to describe it?
From humble beginnings to a future filled with innovation. At every step, Decred’s evolution has been carefully considered and implemented.
In the beginning, Decred’s code was built on the btcsuite codebase, an alternative full node Bitcoin implementation written in Go. Despite Decred being based on Bitcoin’s code, it’s a standalone cryptocurrency, not a “Bitcoin fork”.
Decred has been built from the ground up to evolve, central to this has been, Decred’s formal governance system that gives the coin holders the final say on consensus upgrades and treasury spending.
Which brings us to 2023, the year that Decred turns 7 years old!
The year Decred solved scalability
Since before 2017 blockchain developers have considered the problem of how to scale the number of transactions per second whilst remaining cheap to transact with. All whilst maintaining a lightweight chain which enables the decentralisation aspect of the protocol. The answer for Decred came in the form of the second layer solution, “The Lightning Network”.
As this was a contentious issue, that would use treasury funds to build, it was put up for voting. On May 9th, 2019 at block 342,784 the community passed a proposal for the Lightning Network to be implemented on the chain with an 85% approval.
The key issues for scaling are – speed, velocity, security and decentralisation
To be a global currency, you need fast transactions that are cheap to process. Blockchains are inherently bad at these two things at scale. The bigger a blockchain gets, the fewer people will run full nodes, which decreases decentralisation. Faster blocks have this problem, as do bigger blocks.
If you keep the blocks small and slow, you can’t process enough transactions per second. Which will increase the price of use, making smaller transactions costly.
The route Decred took was the Lightning Network. Decred aims to keep the layer 1 blockchain as small and as efficient as possible. Whilst using the off-chain processes of this layer 2 solution to facilitate transactions and use-cases that typically only require small amounts of DCR (1 atom - 0.00000001 DCR).
Enter Bison Relay
Decred’s innovative solution to facilitating global e-commerce and opening a world of possibilities for 2023 and beyond! Bison Relay is the first solution to be built on top of Decred’s Lightning Network. No funds from the treasury were used to build this project, and it was a permissionless implementation, which needed no changes or upgrades to Decred’s consensus / protocol.
Did you know anyone can build on top of the Decred Lightning Network? This is the first time it’s been done, but it won’t be the last.
Decred has now come full circle and is more feature ready than any other blockchain. The past is the past, but the future is Decred!
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