DEV Community

Cover image for Graphene blockchain technology explained. Top advantages & Major players
Diana Maltseva
Diana Maltseva

Posted on

Graphene blockchain technology explained. Top advantages & Major players

Nowadays almost everyone in the business world has already heard about “Blockchain”, “Bitcoin”, and “Ethereum”, wondering how they all work and how companies can take advantage of their integration.

Being interested in blockchain dev and covering blockchain-related topics, here I'd like to take a look at another promising technology, called Graphene blockchain. Offering a plenty of benefits, it is expected to call a wave in Graphene-based projects.

Can it handle thousands of transactions in a wink and move value fast? Can apps be built upon it? Can it potentially change the way we live? Can it call a boom in innovative business models? In speaking of Graphene, the answer is yes!

What is Graphene blockchain

Graphene is an open-source blockchain technology, mainly written in C++. Graphene source is available in numerous variations, as it has been forked and adapted a lot of times.

There is no other known blockchain like Graphene that can even try to compete in the processing such a high number of transactions this blockchain already can. Although Bitcoin aid the foundation of a new industry, it doesn’t provide so many capabilities.

Graphene-based coins can do something Bitcoin was never capable of and will never be. And that is being a real-time value exchange system that will get mass adoption, with great apps build upon it. In any case, old technology is good to learn from.

Right now Graphene is able to push over 3000 transactions per second, versus Ethereum, currently at around 25 transactions per second. That means around 190000 transactions per minute. And that is not in the future, it is now!

Want to see some bright examples of this top-notch blockchain technology at work? If you are on Steemit, a news aggregation site, and crypto-based platform, you are part of it already.

BitShares, a cryptocurrency exchange marketplace, and Steemit came from the same technology base, both originally created by Daniel Larimer and now continued by other motivated and skilled developers.

The main Graphene players

- BitShares – a decentralized asset exchange (like the New York Stock Exchange on the blockchain).

- Steemit – a decentralized social media platform (like Facebook on the blockchain).

- EOS – a decentralized smart contract platform (like banks, real estate, corporations, small businesses, and more on the blockchain).

Also, find out what are Graphene adavantages and what is Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS).

Top comments (3)

Collapse
 
thorstenhirsch profile image
Thorsten Hirsch

Hi Diana. After reading your article I was wondering why Graphene is not one of the most popular blockchains. But it becomes clear when reading this article from BitShares, which presents more details about Graphene.

Graphene has been designed especially for transactions (token transfer) and high-throughput in order to compete with Visa and Mastercard. This results in a lack of versatility, so comparing it to Ethereum is ...well, pretty unfair for Ethereum. Graphene also has very high requirements especially when it comes to the bandwidth:

The real bottleneck is not the memory requirements, but the bandwidth requirements. At 1 million transactions per second and 256 bytes per transaction, the network would require 256 megabytes per second (1 Gbit/sec).

Actually there's an error in their calculations. 256 MByte/s == 2 GBit/s, but the article jumps from 100.000 tps (-> 25 MByte/s == 200 MBit/s) to 1 million tps for no reason... anyway, all these numbers are too high for worldwide adoption. Graphene was not built to compete with Bitcoin, it is probably only a PoC to see what happens when you mix blockchain technology with high performance architecture as seen in LMAX.

There doesn't seem to be much demand for Graphene since not many developers have contributed to the github repo lately.

Collapse
 
dianamaltseva8 profile image
Diana Maltseva • Edited

Hi, Thorsten! Yes, you are right, but I didn't mean that Graphene was created to compete with Bitcoin. The goal is to show that Graphene has great prospects for the emergence of many innovative projects like Steemit.)

Collapse
 
librehash profile image
librehash

It isn't one of the more popular blockchains out there because it makes several leaps in logic - most of which are likely promulgated by the fact that its core (and only) focus, it seems, is on increasing the transaction throughput without concern for the other relevant network metrics, such as:

  1. Size of the transaction

  2. Network throughput (gotta ensure that all of those transactions propagate somehow)

  3. Being an actual blockchain

Yes, #3 was stated here because Graphene does not represent blockchain, but rather a bastardization of it that many have been trying to hawk off oas as blockchain for a considerable amount of time.

DPoS or any other consensus variant of the like that is not firmly implanted as "Proof of Work" (and iterated as such), is bound to fail miserably. And that's just a tacit fact.