The largest cryptocurrency project from South Korea ‘ICON (ICX)’ has officially unveiled Loop Fault Tolerance 2.0 (LFT2), a new consensus algorithm that improves the performance of blockchains, after 3 years of research and development. LFT2 white paper is published on Github. This is the first time a South Korean team successfully innovated on the most important component of blockchain technology.
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Cryptocurrencies are powered by distributed systems that depend on consensus algorithms to verify all transactions in a trustless manner. Bitcoin and Ethereum, two of the most popular cryptocurrencies today, use Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus, which has been criticized for its slowness and high energy consumption. Various types of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus have been popular amongst newer cryptocurrencies such as EOS (Pipelined) and Cosmos (Tendermint). LFT2 has proven performance improvements over PBFT in the areas of scalability and network bandwidth without compromising two fundamental requirements – safety and liveness.
In simplest terms, PBFT-based algorithms require a large number of message exchanges to reach consensus for one block. LFT2 has reduced the message traffic that is needed for the PBFT-based consensus algorithms from 3 to 2 steps without compromising safety and liveness. By reducing the network load, voting can be done faster, improving overall throughput and reducing network latency.
LFT2 has been audited by the KAIST University research team that discovered problems with Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) consensus algorithm used by Stellar, a top 15 cryptocurrency, in a 2019 published report Is Stellar As Secure As You Think?. For LFT2, KAIST University team wrote, “We analyze a consensus algorithm called LFT2, which is used by a blockchain system, ICON. We prove that LFT2 satisfies safety and liveness, where a certain assumption is required to prove liveness.” The full audit report is published on arXiv.org.
“We’re proud of our accomplishments with LFT2. This alone clearly shows why ICON is the top Korean project. But, we still have a lot of work ahead of us,” said Min Kim, ICON Foundation Council Member and Founder of the ICON Project. “ICON was once dubbed the ‘Korean Ethereum’. We’ve come a long way since then. LFT2 is hard evidence that ICON and Korea now have the technical prowess to innovate head-to-head with global blockchain projects like Ethereum.”
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