Scalability

Rhombus's approach to scalability

The Rhombus platform was deployed with a native implementation of Segwit.

This has the added benefit of making all transactions (including private ones) go through Segwit by default, resulting in better scalability and cheaper transaction fees.

Unlike forked Segwit implementations, 100% of Rhombus addresses are compatible with Segregated Witness.

Segwit grants additional features to the Rhombus platform such as transaction malleability vulnerability protection and block capacity increase, but its most notorious feature is that it renders Rhombus’s blockchain compatible with the Lightning Network.

RingCT transactions are much heavier than regular transactions, meaning that as the number of RingCT transactions executed increases, so does the size of the blockchain. This can become a problem when the size of the blockchain becomes so big that most people start connecting on third-party nodes instead of their own. It is also highly impractical to store full nodes on personal computers when they are several GBs or even TBs.

One solution currently under development to increase the scalability of the RingCT privacy protocol is Bulletproofs, “a new, non-interactive zero-knowledge proof protocol with very short proofs and without a trusted setup”.

This protocol is expected to reduce the RingCT and CT transaction sizes by around 80% and as such, constitute a very important item in our scalability strategy.

Read the full Bulletproofs whitepaper co-authored by Benedikt Bunz, Jonathan Bootle, Dan Boneh, Andrew Poelstra, Pieter Wuille, and Greg Maxwell.

Lightning network for Rhombus is not yet implemented

The Lightning Network is a decentralized payment channel protocol first proposed by Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja in their Lightning Network whitepaper and powered using smart-contract functionality in the blockchain to enable instant, near-zero fee payments across a network of participants and can offer another layer of privacy.

Lightning-fast blockchain payments without worrying about block confirmation times. Security is enforced by blockchain smart-contracts without creating a on-blockchain transaction for individual payments. Payment speed measured in milliseconds to seconds.

Capable of millions to billions of transactions per second across the network. Capacity blows away legacy payment rails by many orders of magnitude. Attaching payment per action/click is now possible without custodians.

By transacting and settling off-blockchain, the Lightning Network allows for exceptionally low fees, which allows for emerging use cases such as instant micropayments.

Cross-chain atomic swaps can occur off-chain instantly with heterogeneous blockchain consensus rules. So long as the chains can support the same cryptographic hash function, it is possible to make transactions across blockchains without trust in third-party custodians.