After three years of research and development, South Korea's largest cryptocurrency project 'ICON (ICX)' has officially unveiled Loop Fault Tolerance 2.0 (LFT2), a new consensus algorithm that improves the performance of blockchains.
Founded in August 2017, ICON is the largest and most well-known cryptocurrency project from South Korea. The company aims to build a hybrid Blockchain network that bridges autonomous online communities and real-world private enterprises.
ICON is currently the 8th most utilized blockchain and fully decentralized with 120 validators from around the world. LFT2 is scheduled to be implemented later this year.
LFT2 white paper is published on Github. This is the first time a South Korean team successfully innovated on the most important component of blockchain technology.
Cryptocurrencies are powered by distributed systems that depend on consensus algorithms to verify all transactions in a trustless manner, according to the firm.
Bitcoin and Ethereum, two of the most popular cryptocurrencies today, use Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus, which has been criticized for its slowness and high energy consumption, it says.
Reducing network latency
"Various types of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus have been popular amongst newer cryptocurrencies such as EOS (Pipelined) and Cosmos (Tendermint). LFT2 has proven performance improvements over PBFT in the areas of scalability and network bandwidth without compromising two fundamental requirements - safety and liveness," ICON notes.
In simplest terms, PBFT-based algorithms require a large number of message exchanges to reach consensus for one block, the firm explains.
It says that LFT2 has reduced the message traffic that is needed for the PBFT-based consensus algorithms from 3 to 2 steps without compromising safety and liveness. By reducing the network load, voting can be done faster, improving overall throughput and reducing network latency.
"We're proud of our accomplishments with LFT2. This alone clearly shows why ICON is the top Korean project. But, we still have a lot of work ahead of us. ICON was once dubbed the 'Korean Ethereum'. We've come a long way since then. LFT2 is hard evidence that ICON and Korea now have the technical prowess to innovate head-to-head with global blockchain projects like Ethereum," said Min Kim, ICON Foundation Council Member and Founder of the ICON Project.
