Scientists from MIT, Berkeley and Stanford Are Working For a New Coin

By Rishma Banerjee

Cryptocurrency and its popularity have been on the rise for quite some time now. According to reports, scientists at MIT, Berkley and Stanford University in the United States are working on a new coin which aims to solve the issue about scalability without compromising on decentralization. Its name is Unit-e.

Scalability and volatility are one of the big issues which keep bitcoin and crypto in general from growing to the next phase of development and adoption. To remedy this situation, scientists from seven universities, which include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University and Berkley are all working on creating a cryptocurrency which can process thousands of transactions per second without hampering on decentralization.

Unit-e is the name of this new coin, the first prototype currency which is to be the guinea pig for the  Distributed Technology Research (DTR) initiative, which is being backed by Pantera Capital, one of the largest crypto and blockchain focused hedge funds in existence.

DTR claim that bitcoin’s scalability issues are in part the reason behind its limited appeal to mainstream transactors, and see this as a new approach which may help bring cryptocurrency to the mainstream.

Joey Krug co-chief investment officer at Pantera Capital and said in an interview:

“The mainstream public is aware that these networks don’t scale. We are on the cusp of something where if this doesn’t scale relatively soon, it may be relegated to ideas that were nice but didn’t work in practice: more like 3D printing than the internet.”

A launch of Unit-e is expected sometime during the summer according to DTR. The bitcoin network can process around seven transactions per second, whilst Ethereum can do 20 to 30 and bitcoin cash can do around 60. DTR is aiming at around 10,000 transactions and will be launched very soon.

Whilst Unit-e seems like it might have a lot of potentials, its success is by no means guaranteed. It will need to gain traction after it is launched and function well in other areas, including supporting smart contracts.

Scalability has been on the agenda for some time and there have been several innovative solutions developed which aim to deal with it. Layer-two solutions such as the lightning network which allow for small and frequent transactions to happen off-chain before the final totals are added in one go to the network sort of skirt around the problem of block size and speed. But they do not solve it and have their own problems. Without a more comprehensive solution to scalability, a network’s use-capability will only reach a certain size and will always limit its ability to become a really usable network.

Pramod Viswanath, one of the scientists working at DTR put it simply:

“Bitcoin has shown us that distributed trust is possible but its just not scaling at a dimension that could make it a truly global everyday money. It was a breakthrough that has the capacity to change human lives but that won’t happen unless the technology can be scaled up.”