David Chaum, who gained fame for constructing a digital currency long before Bitcoin, has emerged to introduce a new platform, Elixxir, at Consensus Singapore. He claims Elixxir will be able to process thousands of transactions per second.
David Chaum, widely seen as the inventor of digital cash, and a well-known advocate for blockchain technology, is now ready to unleash a new platform he claims can churn through thousands of transactions per second.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Chaum’s Elixxir platform produces blocks first and then sees them filled up as transactions are recorded, cutting down on processing time.
Chaum says the overall system processes and stores less data, which lessens potential security vulnerabilities and slashes the amount of required energy.
Introducing Elixxir
A press release says Elixxir was the product of almost two years of behind-the-scenes development.
Chaum officially unveiled the platform at CoinDesk Consensus Singapore. At the conference, he shared a technical breakdown of Elixxir and invited people to participate in the platform’s community.
According to Chaum, there are some fundamental solutions that are still needed for blockchain to make the “critical leap” from “store-of-value to consumer-scale payment and messaging.” He thinks Elixxir can solve many of these problems.
Overall, the Elixxir blockchain’s transaction processing speed essentially enables its “use as a smartphone app.”
In an interview, Chaum heralded the breakthroughs as a “game changer”, and asserted it was now possible to “actually meet the requirements to go to consumer scale.” He says Elixxir will be released as an open-source project.
David Chaum…Cryptocurrency Pioneer
David Chaum has been hard at work on ideas related to cryptocurrencies since the 1980s.
However, he told the Wall Street Journal how his 1990s invention, DigiCash, would not have ever been used at the time due to a lack of knowledge about the Internet.
Chaum, also referred to as the “father of online privacy,” is also well-known for his cryptography and secure election systems expertise, having founded the International Association for Cryptologic Research and the Voting Systems Institute.
