We live in a world where speed and mobility are two of the most coveted attributes. One of the areas where this need for speed has been most prominent so far has been in the field of conducting transactions.
Whether it is making payments for a good or service, or simply transferring money to someone you know, transactions being conducted daily are continuing to skyrocket. Last year, remittances around the world reached $689 billion, up from $633 billion in 2017. From all indications, this number should be on the upsurge this year as well.
Modern payment processors and the scalability problem
As expected, technology has made it incredibly easy to make money transfers. Thanks to payment processors such as VISA, Square, and PayPal, people have been able to seamlessly work around the traditional banking system to make live borderless transactions.
Still, there are certain issues to be combated. First, there is the problem of security and the fact that these payment processors store both the transactions and their data on centralized servers. Centralized servers mean a single repository of data, and companies that make use of this storage system are always at the risk of being hacked.
Second, there’s the scalability issue, which been one of the key problems of payment processors. As things stand, the popular processors have millions of transactions cast on a daily basis. The heavy transaction loads mean that the networks will increase in latency, and transactions will slow down.
Most payment processors and portals being to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication; a Belgium-based organization that forms the standard for making transfers across financial institutions all over the world. So far, SWIFT has been criticized for being incredibly slow, while fees remain exorbitant. Given the load that has been put on this network, further scaling is impossible.
Blockchains have tried and failed so far
Blockchain is a convenient technology to use for mobile payments: secure and fast, it has the potential to improve the payment industry. However, a lot of blockchain networks have also experienced problems with scalability. Modern payment systems payment should be able to support millions of active users, but most blockchain networks are not ready to take that load.
The perfect example of the scalability issue that cryptocurrency and blockchain networks have is with Bitcoin. The asset is by far the most valuable and most adopted cryptocurrency in the world, with some major businesses accepting it as well. However, it has also slowed down majorly over time. Bitcoin is now only able to process about seven transactions in a second; a rate which, in itself, it is still much slower than a lot of traditional payment processing mechanisms. The increased load on the network has become a tad too much to bear, and the network has suffered the brunt of it.
Thus, despite the fact that the blockchain has great potential for implementation in the field of payments, the scalability problem remains unresolved.
ILCoin and the RIFT protocol
This is where ILCoin comes in. It first came to the market in 2015 with ILC cryptocurrency, but today ILCoin Blockchain Project focuses on developing modern solutions to blockchain’s most pressing problems. In the second part of November 2019, the project introduced RIFT, a revolutionary blockchain protocol that makes use of two-layer blockchain and advanced parallel sync mechanism – in order to exponentially increase the block size and optimize data transfer.
RIFT comes with two layers of blocks: the original block layer, and the mini-block layer. Both of these help the protocol to contain even more data per block and operate it efficiently, thus increasing speed and refusing latency on the network. As opposed to the block layer, the mini blocks on the RIFT protocol aren’t mined. Instead, they come with references to transactions, a structure that allows the RIFT protocol to store large files on-chain and access them easily.
With 5Gb stable blocks, 3-minute block generation time, and 232 bytes transaction weight, RIFT handles 23 140 987 transactions per each block. Starting the end of November, the enhanced blocks have gone live, and can be checked out in ILCoin Block Explorer (block #310280) as the real proof of the technology’s capacities.
Essentially, the protocol is able to provide decentralization and seamless synchronization. With its optimized data transfer, RIFT makes it possible for anyone to enjoy the speed and convenience that they have come to desire from payment platforms directly from their smartphone, using a standard mobile connection. Since it can handle ten times more transactions in a second than traditional payment methods (and thousands of times more than popular blockchains), it is a grand step towards for massive adoption.
This presents a huge opportunity for companies that rely on the Internet to receive their payments and conducting transactions. As your company grows and you get an increase in your clientele, you have a payment protocol that is able to support your growth and ensure that your systems don’t get slower as your customers grow.
In today’s world, it is important for every company to get the upper hand over its competitors in pretty much every way it can. With seamless mobile payments made possible on the RIFT protocol, companies can take advantage of it and optimize their processes significantly.
Author Bio: Tanvir Zafar is a journalist. You can found him featured on many big journals and crypto medias.
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