Presentation for https://gears.gent/ A technical overview of the current blockchain landscape: what types of blockchain are around, where do they differ or shine and what are their drawbacks? And how do you get started with a specific blockchain technology?

1. Overview of the
BLOCKCHAIN
landscape in 2018
GEARS18 - June, 2018

2. R o d e r i k
v a n d e r Ve e r
C T O & F O U N D E R
A technologist in heart and soul. After building and managing large digital
transformation projects for a decade, he was bitten by the fascination for
the blockchain technology and the promise it holds. He is a regular public
speaker on Blockchain technology and passionate about innovation and
the technology to do so. SettleMint delivers the shortest path from a
business idea to a blockchain based product. The SettleMint team bundles
decades of experience in development and finance together with an in-
depth and practical knowledge of blockchain technologies and use cases.
Technologist at heart,
trade and experience
https://twitter.com/r0derik
https://www.linkedin.com/in/roderik/

3. Kick-ass team
SettleMint
Leuven / Dubai
Headquarters in Leuven,
Belgium and a regional
office in Dubai, U.A.E.
16 people
All experienced specialists
in their field, from R&D to
sales and marketing.
Hiring now, vacancies on
https://settlemint.com

4. Blockchain is a technology
for decentralised storage and
a decentralised consensus mechanism
enabling peer to peer transactions,
according to predefined rules,
without the need for third parties to enforce the rules and
provide trust in the enforcement of those rules.

5. Blockchain is a technology
for decentralised storage and
a decentralised consensus mechanism
enabling peer to peer transactions,
according to predefined rules,
without the need for third parties to enforce the rules and
provide trust in the enforcement of those rules.

6. What makes a “good” blockchain
Truth is, it all depends on the use-case

7. What makes a “good” blockchain
Truth is, it all depends on the use-case
DECENTRALISATION
Are there central
parties required to
make it work.

8. What makes a “good” blockchain
Truth is, it all depends on the use-case
DECENTRALISATION
Are there central
parties required to
make it work.
FEES
What is the cost of
doing a transaction on
the chain,.

9. What makes a “good” blockchain
Truth is, it all depends on the use-case
DECENTRALISATION
Are there central
parties required to
make it work.
FEES
What is the cost of
doing a transaction on
the chain,.
SCALABILITY
How many
transactions can the
system handle.

10. What makes a “good” blockchain
Truth is, it all depends on the use-case
DECENTRALISATION
Are there central
parties required to
make it work.
FEES
What is the cost of
doing a transaction on
the chain,.
SCALABILITY
How many
transactions can the
system handle.
PRIVACY
Are transactions and
account balances
public.

11. What makes a “good” blockchain
Truth is, it all depends on the use-case
DECENTRALISATION
Are there central
parties required to
make it work.
FEES
What is the cost of
doing a transaction on
the chain,.
SCALABILITY
How many
transactions can the
system handle.
PRIVACY
Are transactions and
account balances
public.
COMMUNITY
Is there an active (dev)
community building on
the blockchain?

12. Scalability
DecentralisationSecurity
The blockchain trilemma, pick 2…
Enables censorship-resistance and permits anyone to
partake in a decentralised ecosystem without prejudice.
Decentralisation
Ability to process transactions on any given network.
If public blockchains are to be usable by the masses,
then they must be able to handle a scenario in which
there are millions of users on the network.
Scalability
Maintaining the immutability of the ledger and its
general resistance to attacks such as 51% attacks, Sybil
attacks, DDoS attacks etc.
Security

13. The evolution of blockchain technology
Bitcoin, Monero, Dash, …
Currencies
1.0

14. The evolution of blockchain technology
Bitcoin, Monero, Dash, …
Currencies
Ethereum, Neo, Lisk…
Smart contracts
1.0 2.0

15. The evolution of blockchain technology
Bitcoin, Monero, Dash, …
Currencies
Ethereum, Neo, Lisk…
Smart contracts
Cardano, EOS, IOTA…
Hacking trilemma
1.0 2.0 3.0

16. BLOCKCHAIN 1.0

17. Bitcoin
January 2009 - $110 billion market cap
“A purely peer-to-peer electronic cash system.”
DECENTRALISATION
A lot of mining nodes,
extremely repressive
against censorship or
even technical changes.
Heavy concentration of
miners in China, which
poses a risk of attack by
state actors.
FEES SCALABILITY PRIVACY SECURITY LIVE / IN USE
Currently about $1 per
transaction with spikes in
last year to over $50 per
transaction.
Between 3.3 and 7
transactions per second.
Limitations in the 1MB
block size and 10 minute
block time.
Several projects building
second level solutions.
Pseudo-anonymous
Analytics is being
performed by state actors
and law enforcement.
About 10.000 nodes
running Proof of Work
with a high difficulty.
Actively in use since
inception.

18. Monero
April 2014 - $2 billion market cap
“Private, untraceable, fungible decentralised Digital Currency.”
DECENTRALISATION
By design
decentralisation like
Bitcoin, but the built in
privacy features makes it
impossible to determine
information on the miners
.
FEES SCALABILITY PRIVACY SECURITY LIVE / IN USE
Currently about $0.2 - $1
per transaction
Theoretically 1600TPS
with modern hardware.
Fully anonymous 1700 nodes active which
is good.
5% of all Monero in
circulation was obtained
by criminal activity.
Actively in use since
inception.

19. Dash
January 2014 - $2 billion market cap
“Secure open-source platform for instant, private payments with Digital Cash.”
DECENTRALISATION
Power aggregated in pay-
based ‘Masternodes
system’ collecting the
network fees.
Decentralisation
statistically unverifiable
(no information about
initial coin distribution).
FEES SCALABILITY PRIVACY SECURITY LIVE / IN USE
Currently about $0.10 on
average per transaction
Theoretically 48TPS with
modern hardware.
Anonymous 4650 active Masternodes
active which is good.
Actively in use since
inception.

20. BLOCKCHAIN 2.0

21. Ethereum
July 2015 - $50 billion market cap
“A decentralised platform running smart contracts for applications to run as
programmed without downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference.”
DECENTRALISATION
A lot of mining nodes.
Heavy concentration of
miners in China, which
poses a risk of attack by
state actors.
FEES SCALABILITY PRIVACY SECURITY LIVE / IN USE
Currently about
$0.01-0.02, live tracking is
possible via
https://ethgasstation.info/
15 TPS in the public setup,
over 1000TPS in
consortium setups.
Work is being done to
add sharding to the
protocol.
Several projects building
second level solutions.
Pseudo-anonymous About 15.700 nodes
running Proof of Work
with a high difficulty.
History of contentious
hard forks.
Upcoming fork to switch
to Proof of Stake which is
experimental.
Actively in use since
inception.
~90% of all dAPPs runs
on top of Ethereum.
~30% of the top 100
cryptocurrencies are
actually tokens on top of
Ethereum

22. NEO
August 2014 - $2,5 billion market cap
“Distributed “smart economies” with blockchain technology,
digital identity and automation with smart contracts.”
DECENTRALISATION
Only 9 nodes, each run by
company/entity selected
by NEO council and
under contract.
FEES SCALABILITY PRIVACY SECURITY LIVE / IN USE
Deploying a simple smart
contract costs upwards of
$10.000 in fees.
Transaction fee optional
(for priority)
1000 - 10k TPS
theoretically (on testnet)
Network went down
several times when
reaching 10k TPS
Goal of 100k TPS by 2020
Pseudo-anonymous 9 nodes owned by the
NEO Foundation running
delegated byzantine fault
tolerance is an extreme
risk of tampering.
Many outages that shut
down the entire network.
About 51 contracts
deployed, all tokens.

23. Lisk
May 2016 - $700 million market cap
“Build and deploy blockchains in Javascript with effortless
scaling though you project evolution.”
DECENTRALISATION
Top 101 “Delegates”
control network
consensus
Token holders cast votes
to Delegates
Lisk Team holds enough
voting weight to take over
101 Delegates at any point
FEES SCALABILITY PRIVACY SECURITY LIVE / IN USE
Fixed:
Outgoing Transaction: 0.1 LSK
Delegate Registration: 25 LSK
Voting: 1 LSK/round (33 votes)
Multi-sig: 5 LSK/member
2.5 TPS Pseudo-anonymous Considerable amount of
voting weight for
Delegates selection in
hands of Lisk Foundation
Lisk Core Built-in security
Measurements vulnerable
to faulty transaction
broadcast
Testnet
No Mainnet launch
announced yet

24. BLOCKCHAIN 3.0

25. Cardano
September 2017 - $4 billion market cap
“Peer-reviewed smart contract platform evolved out of scientific philosophy &
research-1st dive approach to deliver the most advanced features for blockchains”
DECENTRALISATION
Network currently run by
1 node held by Cardano
Slot leader eligibility
proportional to Stake
held
Not enough information
about Stake distribution
for proper evaluation
FEES SCALABILITY PRIVACY SECURITY LIVE / IN USE
Min 0.155381 ADA
= $0,024*
(+ 0.000043946 ADA/byte)
= $0.00000704/byte*
1 ADA = $0,157361
5-7 TPS in current test
phase
Potentially much more
(billions?) when
development completed
Opt-in style (identity
recording of required, as
un buying property)
1 running Node for testing
Ourobros Proof-of-Stake
algorithm run by known
stake holding nodes
Only TestNet running
with 1 node at he moment

26. EOS
September 2017 - $4 billion market cap
“All-in-one quick and easy platform for the creation, hosting and execution of
highly scalable dApps including user authentication, accounts to cloud storage
and server hosting. ”
DECENTRALISATION
21 Block Producing Nodes
controlled by EOS-cartel
members
50% tokens held by 10
address
FEES SCALABILITY PRIVACY SECURITY LIVE / IN USE
No transaction fees
Network maintenance
cost on side of
developers as available
bandwidth depends on
tokens held
Reportedly 30k-50k TPS
in testing phase
Mainnet:
Worst Case: 1,000 TPS
Average Case: 3,000 TPS
Best Case: 8,000 TPS
Pseudo-Anonymous 21 nodes running dPoS
consensus mechanism
Vulnerable delegates
voting mechanism
Chaotic Mainnet launch
To be continued…

27. IOTA
2015 - $3 billion market cap
“Open-source distributed ledger built to power the future of the Internet-of-
Things with fee-less micro-transactions and data integrity for machines.”
DECENTRALISATION
Coordinator Nodes run
by Foundation required
for transaction clearance
Potentially decentralised
when network strong
enough to withstand
attacks
FEES SCALABILITY PRIVACY SECURITY LIVE / IN USE
None
‘Computing power fee’ as
to make a transaction you
need to validate 2 other
transactions
Theoretically 500-800
TPS
‘Spamnet’ currently at
12-13 TPS
Might face scaling issues
when implemented on
wider network.
Pseudo-anonymous 23 public nodes
Total full nodes unknown
(most not public)
Coordinator Nodes
required to prevent 34%
attack
Currently Devnet
(Testnet) and Spamnet
Canarynet and Testnet1
announced
No Mainnet launch
planned yet

28. JUST ONE MORE THING

29. B R E A K S E C T I O N
https://cryptozombies.io/
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