Ever since Bitcoin followed by Smart Contracts were introduced more blockchain technologies have emerged. You might find a blockchain that focuses on privacy while another that focuses on speed and many other examples but none or rarely ever that you find one that focuses on supporting other chains; rendering interoperability between different blockchains a real problem. This is a major issue that segregates the blockchain progression and advancements.
PCHAIN was set out with one goal in mind. To create a public chain with native support for multiple chains, EVM included. PCHAIN utilizes POS consensus with sharding capabilities to allow for high number of transactions. When I mentioned earlier that PCHAIN has the ability to support different chains and smart contracts this also means that the different tokens can be used directly in the platform. If you have an ERC20 token, you can easily use it within PCHAIN. PCHAIN extended its solution to also allow for easier development and smarter smart contracts. Smarter smart contracts means they can scale. Let us start with how PCHAIN allows for easier smart contracts development?
Smart contracts as we know them have a specific language; taking Ethereum network as an example; the smart contracts are developed using solidity and pushed to mainnet (or testnet for that matter). Those smart contracts are restricted to their opcode operations exposed through solidity. PCHAIN instead of creating their own smart contracts development language they decided to do things differently and use an existing programming language with its virtual machine like HyperLedger or Java. PChain opted for HyperLedger because it is the one mostly used to create private chains and the most stable. This decision will allow easier learning curve and faster adoption of the platform and even a much more flexible smart contracts.
The other issue with many prominent platforms that support smart contracts is scalablility. Despite their orientation they are quite limited when it comes to the number of transaction per second. Ethereum for example can support few transactions per second which can range between 10–24 in its current state. However when you consider real world applications that number of transaction per second is not sufficient. Take twitter for example it can process numerous tweets per second. PCHAIN had that in mind and set to also tackle that issue.
PCHAIN decided that having a single chain would not solve those problems and for that they decided to go for a multi-chain approach which was mentioned earlier. In essence you will have a mainchain and sidechains. This is where the name of PCHAIN came from. If we try to visualize it as in the figure below you will see the symbol pi starting to form. The M in the graph is the mainchain and P & Q are the sidechains. hence the name pchain.
The sidechains represent DApps; for each DApp there is a sidechain. When a new DApp is created a new sidechain is created as well. As the DApp is executing and transactions and generated; those transactions are added to their corresponding sidechain and the sidechain grows accordingly.
As it is common with blockchains a token is used to execute and process transactions within the platform. However with PCHAIN given it can support multiple blockchains, it can support non-native tokens within the platform along side its token which is called PAI. The way it can make that happen is through running an exchange operation before anything commences. For example if an Ethereum smart contract is to be executed on PCHAIN. The caller will send the necessary ETH to do the operation and before anything happens on PCHAIN. PCHAIN does an exchange from ETH to PAI and then start executing using PAI.
Image above of PCHAIN on Times Square big screen
The project has successfully pushed a testnet as of late and the interesting part is that the testnet was able to execute more than 123k transactions per second. The project is founded and ran by Dr. Feng Cao; Dr. Feng is also the co-founder of ChinaLedger and the inventor of the 1st International Blockchain patent. You can find out more about the team behind PCHAIN in the whitepaper or the website which I will add below in the resources section.
Resources:
Telegram https://t.me/pchain_org
Website https://pchain.org/
Medium https://medium.com/@PCHAIN
Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Pchain_Org_Official/
Twitter https://twitter.com/pchain_org?lang=en
Whitepaper https://pchain.org/js/generic/web/viewer.html
Steemit https://steemit.com/@pchain