Decentralized social network Synereo has announced the development of RChain, their blockchain-based technology stack. Not only will this technology provide scalable decentralized computation abilities, but it will also revolutionize the way the Internet works. An interesting idea, although it will only be deployed in Q4 of 2017 at the earliest.

RChain Improves Upon Existing Blockchain Standards

What RChain does is act as an additional layer on top of the standard open distributed ledger protocol. Synereo refers to this as Blockchain 2.0, which is a sharded and concurrent blockchain at the same time. The term sharded is well-known to Ethereum enthusiasts, as it allows dividing the blockchain into composable parts.

In employing this strategy, Synereo removes the need to have all data sets process information at the same time. This is what makes the Bitcoin blockchain so power-demanding, as it requires tons of computational power to process information on the network. At the same time, concurrent means it enables different Synereo processes to run in parallel, without them interfering or overlapping.

Scalability has been a significant hurdle for open blockchain standards so far. Synereo wanted to address that problem before even launching an alpha version of their platform. A decentralized social platform needs to scale quickly and without problems or bugs. In fact, the team feels RChain will be infinitely scalable, although that remains to be seen for now.

Although Synereo will be a decentralized social network, all of the heavier media files-  images, video, and whatnot – will not be stored on the blockchain. Instead, a new protocol has been developed, called SpecialK. It is worth noting the development of this technology has been ongoing for a few years now and offers distributed storage.

All in all, Synereo is shaping up nicely to give established social platforms a run for their money. That is, assuming their upcoming alpha release goes according to plan. With RChain not being implemented until the end of 2017, it will still take some time before the platform can compete with the likes of Facebook and Instagram.

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