The Mainchain Bakeoff

As we touched upon in our article Making Do With Blockchain, the HUMAN Protocol Foundation has had to limit the full capacity of the Protocol because of the high costs, limited availability and low speed of the Ethereum testnet. The Foundation has limited the blockchain usage to a small percentage of total work available through the HUMAN Network; even the work the Foundation has put through the blockchain has been a diluted version, with fewer updates and blockchain interactions than the system would ideally deliver.

As of the 8th April 2021, the Etherscan for internal HMT contract payments shows:

• 10k transactions to at least 100k addresses for the past 48 hours.

An average of at least one transaction to ten wallets.

But this is only a fraction of the work undertaken through HUMAN Protocol. Most of it simply can’t get to the blockchain.

In Q2 of this year the Foundation will be organising a mainchain bake-off to assess the suitability of blockchain technologies to handle the various demands associated with HUMAN Protocol’s transactions.

The factors we will assess include: availability, speed, latency, centralization, security and sustainability. Given the massive environmental impact of these technologies, we will require all participating chains to submit a plan to attain CO2 neutrality by 2030.

We will publish the results on our Wiki, and the winning chain will set the minimum standard going forward; for the chains that fail to meet that standard, there will be penalties.

We will release smaller pieces on individual chains.