Blockchain technology is certainly receiving mass interest, but not mass adoption. One of the key shortcomings is the sometimes laughably low transaction rate. Bitcoin’s transaction speed is often debated, but average transactions per block peaked in early 2017 at 2,723. Since a block occurs every ten minutes, we can estimate an average of 4.5 transactions per second (TXS). Compare this with VISA, which can process tens of thousands of transactions every second. IOST is focused on solving the scalability problem facing current blockchain systems, using one that’s theoretically capable of 100,000 TXS.
This is achieved through sharding, and new algorithms that keep the system honest. Rather than proof-of-work, which consumes a huge amount of energy, IOST is powered by what they call their “Proof-of-Believability” mechanism. Believability, and therefore consensus, is generated by calculating a node’s contribution and behaviors. To increase fairness and transparency, a Bias-Resistant Distributed Randomness protocol is used in the sharding process.
With all this speed, blockchain-based systems could work in enterprise-level applications. The company aims to do just that and offer decentralized and efficient data storage services. Beyond that, the company also offers dApps and smart contracts on the IOST ecosystem, which can be accessed through the ISOT virtual machine (IVM). Once there, developers can build applications in several major programming languages. This support for multiple languages makes it even more accessible for large-scale applications of the technology.
The token, which currently sits at number 58 on [coinmarketcap.com|http://coinmarketcap.com], went live in early 2018 at an initial price of $0.01 USD per token. It has climbed to $0.023916 USD as of this writing. It spiked to an all-time high of $0.136496 on January 24th, 2018, just a few weeks after launching. While it has fallen off significantly since then, it’s still up 2.39 times the initial price. To see current prices click here.
The market cap is just over $200 million USD, and with a total supply of 21 billion IOST, the circulating supply is 8.4 billion tokens. The price may have fallen in recent months, but it still has significant market cap and decent volume. It’s worth noting that the technical whitepaper states that the ecosystem is still a work in progress, and active research is underway. If they actually can offer 100,000 TXS in a secure and reliable service, real growth could be in their future.
