Phore Blockchain’s Advanced PoS Sharding Architecture “Synapse” to Launch on Testnet May 14, 2019

Phore Synapse, our new and advanced Proof-of-Stake (PoS) sharding architecture will serve as the platform for our Smart Contracts, Sharding, and countless other advanced capabilities. It has been actively in development and is now ready for the next step.

We are pleased to announce the Phore Synapse Beacon (Main) Chain will launch on testnet on Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 9pm PST.

The purpose of this release is to test the stability and usability of the beacon chain code before we move on to the next stage that will be the development of the shard code.

We have not yet implemented a user interface (UI) into the beacon chain, but design discussions are already taking place. Below is an sneak peek of the Phore Synapse Beacon Chain running below:

Pre-selected volunteers will be running 100–300 validators each. Validators propose beacon chain blocks and attest to shard data. Our volunteers will be reporting issues and providing important feedback to us to help improve the code as a critical part of the development process.

Phore Synapse will serve as the foundation for Smart Contract capability. Smart Contracts enable more complex transactions, and the development of an endless array of decentralized applications, as well as the ability to issue tokens. The underlying language of our Smart Contract operations is called “WASM”. This is an important differentiator for Phore when compared to other Smart Contract platforms such as Ethereum or Tron. WASM offers a huge performance advantage and is about 20% faster.

Sharding is a major capability Synapse will offer. It will be possible for each shard to have a different consensus protocol. For example, we can have an identity shard, a privacy shard, or a smart contract shard. To support our anticipated speed and scalability, transfer shards will be used to dramatically increase transaction speeds. So each shard can be optimized for its own use case — meaning it doesn’t compete with other tokens on a single blockchain in the way that current ERC20 tokens do.

The Phore Synapse sharding architecture will give us orders of magnitude in higher scalability than we have now. The theoretical maximum for the current Phore network transactions per second (TPS) was around 70tx/s. With the implementation of SegWit, this doubled to be around 140tx/s (which is already pretty fast compared to others)… However we expect the new architecture to have TPS speeds into the hundreds of thousands and quite possibly, into the millions.

We will be providing development updates as we progress with this exciting new foundation supporting the future of the Phore Blockchain project. Stay Tuned!

0516 updated:

the Phore Synapse testnet was successful in validators signing blocks, however it uncovered an issue with peer discovery (this is what testnets are for after all!)

The testnet has been taken down and will be restarted over the weekend with this issue resolved.

Below is a screenshot from one of our beta testers showing validators signing blocks!

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*rOOe0aW6pwUvWpBG