One of the key developers to work on Bitcoin in its earliest days, Jeff Garzik, has announced plans to launch a new “cross-blockchain” cryptocurrency. The move comes as a response to the perceived shortcomings of existing fixed-blockchain coins. Announced Tuesday at the Money 20/20 conference in Las Vegas, the project is known as Metronome. It seeks to be the first cryptocurrency able to jump between different blockchains, potentially eliminating the need for exchanges when the average user seeks to use multiple platforms.
By allowing users to switch the blockchain on which their tokens are stored, the hope is that Metronome will be able to avoid some of the issues which affect existing projects. In a telephone interview with Fortune, Garzik explained:
Today, bitcoin faces existential threats from forks, developer drama and so on. Knowing what we know and having a clean sheet of paper, we asked what what would we build and the answer is this.
Garzik, along with Matthew Roszak, chairman of industry advocate Chamber of Digital Commerce, founded Bloq, an enterprise-level blockchain solutions company. Bloq subsquently went on to create Metronome. Their plan is to make the coins available on the Ethereum blockchain sometime in December. They will then launch support for additional blockchains early 2018.
The initial distribution of Metronome tokens will consist of a smart-contract-driven, reverse auction. The sale will take place over several days. Bloq, and others involved in development, will hold back 20% of the total ten million coins that will be sold. The reverse auction is hoped to allow more people the opportunity to own the token. The idea being that high-capital buyers won’t be able to immediately swoop in and buy up all the Metronome available.
According to Garzik, the coding of Metronome has been “battle tested” by some of the best minds in the industry. He claims it to be immune to subversion by hackers. The distribution method being entirely built using smart contracts, the project will need to be flawless to avoid a similar fate as the infamous Ethereum DAO hack.
Garzik is confident that his coin will be immune to many of the potential attack vectors which individual blockchains are currently exposed to. He claims that it’s been built to seek stability meaning that Metronome’s success will not be determined by the fate of a single blockchain:
When existential threats hit, it will automatically switch to somewhere safer.
His colleague Roszak told CNBC via phone interview that he believed institutional investors will find Metronome appealing. He went on to claim: “We’ve built a thousand-year cryptocurrency, something that’s built to last.”
Image: TakeLessons
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