Consensus 2019 saw a plethora of projects looking to expand upon the current crypto and blockchain revolution. One project seeking to provide a scalable blockchain is that of ThunderCore.
The current situation in the world of decentralized applications (DApps) requires a vast number of resources to bring such applications to scale, according to realizations from ThunderCore founders Chris Wang and Elaine Shi, ThunderCore marketing vice-president Pan Kamal told CryptoPotato in an interview.
Kamal explained that Elaine Shi researched quickening operations, via improved consensus protocol. “That’s kind of what led to the foundation of ThunderCore, which was essentially an Ethereum-compatible, EVM-compatible blockchain. It’s 100 times faster than Ethereum,” Kamal said. “There’s a one-second confirmation time,” he added, which leads to nearly instantaneous transactions, as opposed to facing wait times of several minutes in some cases.
The marketing vice-president also pointed out improvements in the fees/gas department. Kamal explained ThunderCore is efficient, leading to lower fees. A single Thunder Token (TT), the project’s native asset, has the potential to support about 100,000 transactions, he explained.
As far as token usage goes, Kamal said, “We have a native cryptocurrency for our blockchain, and that the token is used to pay for the utilization of resources on our blockchain.” He continued to explain, “Developers that are looking to write applications for our blockchain would need to essentially acquire those compute resources if you will, through the use of a token, which is our native token called Thunder Token.”
ThunderCore already launched its mainnet, sending out a press release on May 14 publicizing the news, Kamal said. “To be quite clear about this, we actually did a pre-release launch of our mainnet. That took place at the end
of February, early March, so we had a testnet in place for eight months, we had a pre-release launch of our mainnet a couple of months ago,” he added. “The idea around that was just to prove out the performance, the scalability, etc., before we talked to everybody in the world that we have this.” Kamal included that the project’s performance met the team’s expectations.
Kamal also said, “We decided at Consensus to let people know that, hey, it is publicly available, and that in the coming future shortly, we’re also going to have a full node open-source version of that so that folks can now run their nodes with our blockchain.”
Chris Wang, one of ThunderCore’s founders, previously founded Playdom, a gaming company which Disney ended up acquiring for $563 million, ThunderCore’s press release on BusinessWire stated. Playdom saw tens of millions of users on a daily basis.
Kamal pointed out the increasing count of blockchain applications being built, although, “there’s a lack of users,” he said. “There’s a group of folks in our company that know that gaming industry well, and as we started thinking, the strategy around this was – how do we bring non-blockchain users to the blockchain environment?” Kamal stated gaming as such an opportunity, with ThunderCore having several measures in place to help its developers in the area of gaining users.
Kamal clarified gaming is one field of focus, but the project is “not trying to become a gaming platform company.” He added, “We feel that there are multiple use cases where a high-performance blockchain makes a whole lot of sense.” Kamal mentioned other areas such as Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and supply chain.
Many projects in the crypto space look to provide a more scalable blockchain, using Ethereum as the benchmark to beat. It remains to be seen, however, whether anything will overtake Ethereum’s popularity.
With such stated scalability, one might logically question ThunderCore’s decentralization or lack thereof. In response to the question of scalability, Kamal responded, “We’ve addressed that mainly through our consensus protocol.”
He continued, “We have this Thunderella family of protocols, and there’s a continuous improvement process taking place, so we feel that instead of just having one protocol and then trying to, you know, move that and force-fit that into the evolving blockchain, that we continue to improve that process – and that’s through better computer science, better research, and we’re looking to address those.”
“Being able to scale up has to do with the ability to make sure that applications don’t fail when a large number of users come onto that application, so one is the throughput side of things or the transaction speed, the other is the ability to support a large number of users, and our consensus mechanisms actually address both of those,” he said.
Many of the projects in the crypto space are young, so a healthy dose of skepticism may prove crucial as many projects have failed over the last decade or so.
Crypto influencer Boxmining put out a YouTube video back in April, expressing a few positive comments about the project. “What sets ThunderCore apart, is that it scales not only transactions, but it also scales smart contracts,” Boxmining explained.
ChainBulletin posted an article on the drama surrounding ThunderCore’s recent initial exchange offering (IEO), conducted on May 9 via the Huobi Prime Lite platform. “Criticism came from the fact that the asking price at the IEO was way below the price stated at the Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT) round,” ChainBulletin wrote. A source in the article, however, also stated that the IEO price was Huobi’s idea.