Lightchain
Lightchain is an Ethereum-compatible blockchain that is part of Lightstreams' technology stack. Lightchain runs with the same version of the Ethereum Virtual Machine as the Ethereum mainnet but with an alternative Tendermint consensus mechanism.
Smart contracts written for Ethereum will run seamlessly on Lightchain and developer tools and libraries written for Ethereum are compatible with Lightchain.
Lightchain uses a Tendermint Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanism to achieve fast consensus on new block proposals. Using Tendermint for consensus provides a vast improvement in performance for support smart contract execution. Transaction throughput is 50x faster with near-instant settlement time ensuring DApps feel responsive without slow processing times.
The Ethereum network has reached capacity causing bottlenecks for processing transactions. This has resulted in longer processing times making DApps feel painstakingly slow. Settlement is also not guaranteed. The current recommendation is to wait for 6 blocks (approx 96 secs) for confirmation that a transaction has been included in the blockchain.
The Tendermint consensus replaces the original proof-of-work (PoW) consensus of Ethereum, significantly increases the overall speed and responsiveness for DApps in two areas:
Increases the transaction throughput from approx 24 TPS to 600 TPS
Improves state finalisation from no guarantee to 100% confirmed within a 3 secs.
Lightchain has on-chain governance design for controlling updates to its consensus model. You can read more about it in the Lightstream Governance Model paper.
Lightchain source can be access at the Lightchain Github repo.
We welcome feedback and involvement from the developer community in improving Lightchain.
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