MIT Researchers’ New Cryptocurrency ‘Vault’ Requires 99% Less Data than Bitcoin, Will Showcase at NDSS

Researchers working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a cryptocurrency that is 99% less data intensive than Bitcoin. Nodes working on that network would be required to store less data than Bitcoin. The information was released on January 23 in a blog post.

There are several cryptocurrencies that are trying to provide a more efficient network than Bitcoin. However, this is not an easy task. This virtual currency is known as Vault and it will be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) that is going to be held next month. Users can join this new network by downloading just a small fraction of data.

In order for it to work, it deletes empty accounts and it also verifies transactions taking into account just the most recent transactional information.

The results of the network were the following:

“In experiments, Vault reduced the bandwidth for joining its network by 99 percent compared to Bitcoin and 90 percent compared to Ethereum, which is considered one of today’s most efficient cryptocurrencies. Importantly, Vault still ensures that all nodes validate all transactions, providing tight security equal to its existing counterparts.”

At the moment, Vault’s block size limit is currently 10 megabytes, close to 10,000 transactions processed on the network. A user would need to download 500,000 blocks to verify Bitcoin transactions. That means that they would need a free space on their devices of 150 gigabytes.

Vault is different than Bitcoin since it does not use a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm, but it uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) system called Algorand. This consensus algorithm was developed by Silvio Micali, the Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT:

In order to confirm past information, the new blocks used something known as “breadcrumb.” This would allow nodes to join the breadcrumb and start validating transactions.

There are many efforts to reduce the data needed to process transactions in many networks. However, Bitcoin requires a lot of data to operate and keep the network updated and running. This is not the first cryptocurrency announced by the MIT. They have also created another payment network called Unit-e and that works in a fast and smooth way as well.