Category: Recently Added Whitepapers

In this white paper, we introduce the Thunder protocol, a new and provably secure consensus protocol, which overcomes the two main bottlenecks of classic blockchains:

Throughput: Existing blockchains as employed by major crypto-currencies (e.g., Bitcoin or Ethereum) require flooding the whole network with all the transactions. As a consequence, these blockchains do not scale well to handle a large transaction volume. For instance, Bitcoin and Ethereum can handle less than 10 transactions/second. This small throughput severely hinders a wide-spread adoption of such crypto-currencies. As a comparison, VISA handles 2000 transactions/sec.

Confirmation times: The security of Nakamoto’s blockchain protocol requires the block-time to be significantly larger than the maximum network latency [20]; this is why in Bitcoin, new blocks of transactions get mined every 10 minutes, and a transaction is only considered confirmed once it has been incorporated in a block and there are 5 subsequent blocks following it; thus it takes on average one hour for a transaction to be confirmed (with low confidence). While Ethereum uses a smaller block-time, the average confirmation time still remains relatively high—approximately 13 minutes. These long confirmation times hinder many important applications (especially smart contract applications).

Our Thunder protocol overcomes both of these issues, achieving both high throughput and fast confirmation time (under typical circumstances within 2 network roundtrips), while being robust up to a 50% attack.

While we are aware of several other recently suggested approaches for overcoming the above two bottlenecks, these approaches are either restricted to only payments (and do not handle smart contracts), or provide security only against a weaker 1/3-attack; additionally, many approaches are based on heuristic arguments, whereas our protocol is accompanied by a rigorous proof of security; see Section 4 for more details.

The design of Thunder is inspired by a new theoretical paradigm for consensus proposed in our earlier work, Thunderella [21], and provides the first practical instantiation of this general paradigm. This paradigm can be instantiated using either Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake.

IDEX is a hybrid, semi-decentralized exchange that provides a trustless, real-time, high-throughput trading experience in conjunction with blockchain based settlement. By centrally managing trade matching and Ethereum transaction dispatch, IDEX enables users to trade continuously without waiting for transactions to mine, fill multiple orders at once, and cancel orders immediately without gas costs.

The travel industry is one of the largest global vertical markets, valued at over 8 trillion USD1. In 2016, over 1.24 billion cross-border trips were made, generating 1.22 trillion USD in revenue. It is also a highly centralized industry where a few powerful platforms control the user data, content, marketplace and dictate the terms of business. This leads to an inefficient ecosystem that marginalizes both consumers and businesses.

Atlas provides a robust smart contract based protocol for travel ecosystem that incentivizes content creation, data sharing and ensures cooperative yet trust-f ree relationships between service providers across the entire travel value chain. It will facilitate a more efficient exchange of user data, content, goods and services, bringing about a fairer distribution of economic benefits in the travel ecosystem.
• Consumers can own their digital identity, transactional data and receive compensation for the content they create and the data that they disclose.
• Suppliers can offer their inventory directly to consumers without the cost of an intermediary and access user data across the platform on a consent basis, building stronger 1-to-1 relationships with consumers in digital marketing.
• Travel businesses and IP owners can provide services, build independent DApps and launch their own token offerings to the community through Atlas protocol.

With backing from prominent investors including Tencent Holdings, Matrix Partners and Prometheus Capital, the team behind Atlas has successfully created Zanadu, a disruptive and highly influential premium travel platform in China with a strong track- record in the travel industry and established extensive partnerships with the world’s best hotels, travel suppliers, consumer brands and media partners. Our blockchain technology brings a disruptive opportunity to reinvent the travel ecosystem, with Atlas representing a paradigm shift that decentralizes data, content and transactions in the travel industry to a secured and trust-f ree open- network, and in the process, unlocking value and new possibilities for both consumers and businesses.

Atlas Token Whitepaper

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