When Bitcoin was launched 11 years ago it was created with the aim of having a truly decentralized global currency. It was programmed with a blockchain backbone to protect it from manipulations and a supply limit was set at 21 million. It was a revolutionary idea and slowly it’s adoption picked up pace across different kinds of user base. There were people who were convinced that it will free the world from greed of bankers and fed reserve and once it reached a high price it also attracted speculators who joined the game just to make quick money through pumps and dumps.
However as Bitcoin got more and more popular people started to realize it had some inherent limitations which got more noticeable once the number of transactions went up and so did the mining complexity. It led to widespread criticism of Bitcoin being a power guzzler which was consuming more energy than several countries on the whole. Many users also started complaining about the increasing transaction time and the fees linked to these transactions. People started raising concerns about stability of Bitcoin once the user base grows even further in next 4-5 years.
This created opportunity for several forks and new altcoins to enter the crypto space who were built to improve some of the shortcoming in BTC or to provide some new features which were not possible with BTC.
Several coins claim faster transactions including it’s fork BTC Cash. Many coins adopted new concepts like proof of stake to replace the proof of work principle of BTC.
I recently came across HELIOS project whose primary aim is provide a energy efficient coin while maintaining the decentralization and security features of Bitcoin. It’s carbon footprint will be significantly lower as it’s energy consumption will be 10,000 times less than popular coins like BTC and ETH. It will support smart contracts and DApps. This is a totally self funded project to do away the politics and price manipulations of an ICO process. As per their architecture even regular users will be able to setup masternodes without having to purchase expensive hardware or graphic cards.
The first question I had was what exactly is special about their structure which will help them achieve such higher transaction speeds compared to other tokens. In regular blockchains all transactions are queued like cars in a highway and they pass one after the another, so when there is a lot of traffic there is congestion and things get slowed down. In their proposed architecture there will a distributed blockchain which will provide one separate blockchain for each set of users. This will be like having a personal highway where you can drive your car as fast as you want.
For consensus they will be using Proof of Stake mechanism. Participating nodes will be rewarded according to their uptime, participation and performance. As there will be no mining involved there will be a drastic reduction in energy consumption.
As I mentioned earlier they will not conduct an ICO to prevent speculation by whales. They will give out their tokens mainly through airdrops and bounties. So if this sounds interesting to you do lookout for news related to their airdrops.
For more details check their website at - https://heliosprotocol.io/
