Scalability is currently a hot topic in the blockchain industry. Vitalik Buterin has famously discussed the “scalability trilemma”, which says public blockchains can only possess two of the three following properties: decentralization, security, and scalability. It is true that tradeoffs and upfront design decisions must be made to cater to a blockchain project’s ultimate use case. However, projects must also seek to innovate to minimize the negative impacts of their design decisions (e.g., sacrifice a little decentralization for a lot of scalability) and continuously improve on the latest “state-of-the-art” technologies.
In today’s blockchain industry, projects are tackling the scalability challenge in three ways: choice of consensus mechanism, sharding, and layer 2 (off-chain) scaling. With the amount of attention on blockchain scalability, some of the world’s leading technologists are accepting the challenge of achieving Internet-level scalability on the blockchain. Today, IoTeX is proud to announce our partnership with Celer Network, one of the premier projects working on off-chain scaling solutions and research.
“Celer Network is bringing Internet-level scalability to the blockchain. We are excited to work with IoTeX to explore how our technology can impact IoT, where high scalability, low power consumption, and flexibility are crucial.”
— Dr. Mo Dong, Celer Network Co-founder
What is Celer Network?
Celer Network was co-founded by four Ph. Ds from MIT, Princeton, UC Berkeley, and UIUC, and is the first off-chain operating network to bring Internet-level scalability to blockchains. Celer Network is blockchain agnostic and horizontally scalable and combines unique technology and economic architecture to drastically increase the scalability of blockchains through off-chain scaling techniques. It utilizes a layered technology architecture, with several core technical innovations including:
- Channel construct suite with sidechain channels and flexible support for generalized off-chain DApp state transitions
- Optimal state routing algorithm with 15x higher transaction throughput than existing state-of-the-art solutions
- Off-chain operating system that simplifies development and usage of off-chain applications on various platforms
Celer Network launched out of stealth mode in Q1 2018 and has received backings from an impressive list of strategic partners. Since then, they have attracted attention from a wide range of blockchain platforms and applications, and have partnered with top tier projects such as L4 Ventures, Aelf, and Qtum.
How will IoTeX and Celer Network work together?
IoTeX and Celer Network both fundamentally believe that for blockchain to reach mass adoption, it must provide end-users with new capabilities without compromising on end-user experience. Today, users expect similar response times as traditional Internet applications, and blockchain is currently several orders of magnitude behind on this standard. This is especially true for IoT applications as IoT applications often prefer low power consumption and low-latency transactions. IoTeX and Celer are partnering to change the status quo and increase the scalability, flexibility, and usability of the blockchain.
Throughout our technical development, IoTeX will explore and utilize Celer’s off-chain scaling technology to improve the performance of the IoTeX root chain and sub-chains. In addition, we will introduce our development partners (i.e., IoTeX DApps) to Celer Network to identify potential opportunities to increase the scalability and flexibility of their applications. Together, we will help the IoTeX ecosystem achieve new levels of performance and usability.
