Failure By Design? Solving Ethereum Blockchain’s Congestion Problem

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As blockchain technology starts to slowly but surely impact almost every aspect of our everyday lives, there’s an underlying congestion problem – similar to a one road highway on your morning commute – that needs to be resolved. If we want blockchain to live up to its biggest promises, we need a solution that can coordinate large ecosystems with diverse governance models, managing huge numbers of actions all happening at once.

The global blockchain community is currently working hard to take blockchain from the Internet dial-up stage to DSL or cable, but most existing proposals are only quick fixes, not long term solutions. What if we already had the hardware we need to scale the Ethereum blockchain, where the most powerful applications are trying to run? The good news is, we do.

That’s why we created the Tally protocol – a layer 2 protocol that lets applications harness Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) power to perform these heavy-duty calculations that are clogging up the Ethereum blockchain. Think data analysis, complex logic, machine learning, even AI algorithms. We do this by rewarding GPUs with a fair cut of the value that an application’s ecosystem creates, in return for performing this useful work behind the scenes.

To provide some context, a blockchain transaction is basically a price you pay to ensure whatever you just transacted is final. Many current applications represent every user action as its own transaction on the blockchain. That’s an energy intensive task that requires a huge amount of effort on behalf of the blockchain.

The good news is, a lot of these energy intensive transactions are just number crunching. And GPUs, with their parallel architecture, are really good at that. Behind the scenes, Tally will let applications harness GPU power to perform the kind of heavy-duty calculations that will make these powerful applications truly usable and scalable.

From all of this background work, all that the end user needs to know is that they will be able to have the kind of consumer experience in terms of speed and brilliance that everyone’s been waiting for.

Article By Chris Tse, Founding Director of Cardstack

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