GoChain?—?Blockchain at scale

Newcomer GoChain is starting to make some noise in the blockchain community, claiming to solve the Ethereum scaling problem with immediacy, while allowing anyone currently using Ethereum to seamlessly transfer to the GoChain network without making any code changes (thus providing “backward compatibility”). All Ethereum wallets and development tools are expected to be compatible with GoChain.

Proof-of-Reputation

The core invention of GoChain is their consensus mechanism, Proof-of-Reputation (PoR), an evolution from Proof-of-Authority (PoA) that uses companies as validators rather than individuals. While Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains claim decentralization, the reality of these Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithms is a centralization of mining power among very few syndicates, most of them in China. GoChain argues that a selection of 50 companies in 50 different countries as the validators provides an order of magnitude more decentralization. The geographic dispersion also makes the network near immune to censorship.

GoChain makes the case that companies have significantly more to lose than any one individual. A participating company must have a reputation that is important enough that they would face severe financial and/or branding consequences if they were to cheat the system. Larger companies with more to lose will be chosen over smaller companies with less to lose. Selection criteria thus include market capitalization, public traded vs. private companies, and brand significance.

A list of authorized signers (i.e., miners) will be maintained on the GoChain blockchain. Given N authorized signers, a signer may only a block every (N/2) + 1 times to ensure that someone would need control of more than 50% of the signers to perform a malicious attack. The assigned signer for a block is determined by a round-robin lookup of the authorized signer list. If the assigned signer does not respond then other signers can sign at a lower block difficulty level.

To compensate the signers, GoChain has inflation, initially set at 5% in year one, representing a “mining reward” of approximately 16 GoChain tokens when assuming a 10 second block time. In addition, there are transaction fees that the signing node is entitled to keep.

Network

GoChain runs a multi-layered network that includes signing nodes, replica nodes, and non-signing (read-only) nodes. Signers will communicate directly with each other. A node that just finished signing will send the just signed block to other signers in the authorized signers list before sending to a replicating node. This ensures that the authorized signers get the information they need as fast as possible while offloading blockchain and API queries for the rest of the network to dedicated replica nodes.

The replication layer exists for everyone else to request blocks and query the state using a read-only API, thus allowing for horizontal scaling to meet the needs of a global user base.

Roadmap & Traction

There are currencly 18 signing nodes spanning a variety of large enterprises and key organizations in blockchain. In May 2018, GoChain completed their public token sale and launched the mainnet, supporting 1,300 txn/sec. In Q4 2018, they plan to release next generation smart contracts that will be upgradeable. Q1 2019 will see an Apache 2.0 rewrite to increase enterprise adoption of GoChain, and in Q2 2019, a 10x increase in performance to 13,000 txn/sec is targeted.

GoChain has a growing community behind them and recently won a free listing on Binance in round nine of their Community Choice vote, the first vote according to Binance founder Changpeng Zhao that was not tarnished by claims of vote manipulation. Additional exchange listings are Kucoin, Upbit, and Bittrex. GoChain is currently integrated with Trezor and MyEtherWallet.

In the past two months GoChain has signed four ICOs to the platform representing over $100M in investor capital raised including Job.com (20M active users), Veritoken, Solaster Health, and Etherprise. If you found value in this article, please “clap” (up to 50 times).

Core Team

• CEO Jason Dekker is a former prop trader who made his fortune during the first internet bubble, started a hedge fund (Dekker Capital Management) that managed USD 300m, and exited a biotech startup to a public company
• CTO Travis Reeder made a career in building high throughput infrastructure, most recently founding Iron.io, which he sold to an investor consortium that included Oracle
• Head of Business Development Matthew King is an executive with previous experience in technology investment banking at Morgan Stanley and Fortune 500 software sales at Microsoft
• Director of Client Success Ian Alexander recently joined GoChain from IBM Hyperledger

Advisors

• Bill Macaitis is a legendary Silicon Valley CMO who was CMO/CRO of Slack growing them to a USD 6bn+ valuation, CMO at Zendesk leading them through a USD 1.7bn IPO, and SVP Online Marketing at Salesforce
• David R. Koenig is a globally recognized expert in governance, author of the acclaimed book “Governance Reimagined”, and founder of the Directors and Chief Risk Officers group
• Benn Godenzi is the founder of MB Technology, one of the top money raisers in the ICO space having raised over USD 500m for ICOs in the past 12 months alone

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