Winter is coming, but some of us aren’t planning to hibernate. The crypto market continued to rebound this morning, led by the Komodo Platform, whose market cap jumped by 20 percent. A number of updates scheduled for the million-block milestone show that Komodo hasn’t slept through bear season.
Here are some of the eggs the dragon is hatching:
Bitcoin Smart Contracts (Craig Wright need not apply)
Bitcoin has some good qualities, but agility is not one of them. Unlike Ethereum and other dApp platforms, the Bitcoin protocol is intentionally limited to simple accounting commands.
There have been some arranged marriages between Bitcoin-based chains and smart contracts. We’ve previously introduced Rootstock (RSK), the Turing-complete side chain that allows Ethereum-like smart contracts to make computations with regular bitcoins. Bitcoin Cash has also activated op-codes for color tokens and even CryptoKitties.
Komodo has also stepped in with Crypto-Conditions, a mechanism that allows complex smart contracts on Bitcoin-based blockchains. “[This] eliminates one of the major advantages that Ethereum has traditionally had over Bitcoin and BTC-based cryptocurrencies,” Komodo developers said in a blog post.
Four Crypto-Conditions have been added to the Komodo codebase, and will be activated at the millionth block: Faucets, Rewards, Dice, and Assets, which can be used to create ERC20-like tokens.
Solving 51 Percent Attacks
We’ve previously reported on the dangers posed by 51 percent attacks on smaller blockchains like Verge and Bitcoin Gold, one of which ultimately resulted in the latter being delisted from Bittrex earlier this week.
While the rest of crypto-space speculates on the intentions of Jihan Wu and Bitmain’s enormous hashing power, Komodo Platform may have already solved the problem for smaller chains, via the delayed-proof-of-work consensus mechanism. Every ten minutes, a snapshot of the Komodo blockchain—and its affiliate chains—is published in a Bitcoin block, effectively anchoring it to the enormous hash rate of the Bitcoin blockchain. Here it is from the dragon’s mouth:
In essence, the dPoW mechanism provides a form of insurance for your blockchain. An attacker would need to take down both the BTC and KMD networks before they could alter, disrupt, or destroy the backups of your blockchain. The network will not accept a version of the blockchain that doesn’t match the most recently notarized backup.
In other words, in order to double-spend a Komodo token, an attacker would need 51% of the hash power for both the Komodo and Bitcoin blockchains. Good luck with that.
Komodo is a bit like a Swiss-Army Knife of blockchain tools. It’s not always the best tool—sometimes you need a real knife— but with everything from privacy functions to cross-chain exchanges, it’s useful when there’s lots to get done.
That versatility could be what’s keeping Komodo’s head above the water, where other cryptos get washed away by market storms.
The project still has plenty of work ahead, and waiting on development milestones can be more tedious than a book by George RR Martin. However, given the proliferation of new blockchain projects, a system for cross-blockchain interoperability like Komodo’s are likely to find more use as the space develops.
Even Jon Snow knows that.
The author is invested in Bitcoin and Ethereum.
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