Tendermint Exploring Possible Public Blockchain Launch

By May 17, 2016Bitcoin Business

Blockchain app specialist Tendermint is in the early stages of preparing to launch a public blockchain that could find it issuing tokens in a bid to create a platform comparable to bitcoin or Ethereum with alternative capabilities.

First proposed in an ambitious white paper in 2014, Tendermint grew into a project centered on exploring how consensus could be achieved in blockchain systems without relying on electricity-intensive processes like mining. The startup’s tech is now used as a consensus layer by blockchain development platforms like Eris , and due to its construction and goals, has often been associated with private blockchain projects.

In interview, Tendermint co-founder Ethan Buchman acknowledged that the move from the team may seem surprising, and that the business plan for the effort remains in formative stages.

Still, the decision comes after months of what Buchman said has been work to separate Tendermint’s consensus algorithm from top-level applications. The public blockchain, he continued, would attempt to highlight this work to a wider audience.

As part of this effort, he said, Tendermint may seek to become the first public blockchain to implement sharding , a proposed solution to blockchain scalability that is also on the roadmap for Ethereum .

Buchman told CoinDesk: "We’ve created an interface for writing an application in any programming language running on Tendermint. The main centerpiece will manage all the shards. You can have a bitcoin shard, an Ethereum shard, you have enormous flexibility." As far as how its previous target market of enterprise firms would interact with a public blockchain, Buchman said this value proposition has yet to be fully defined.

In this light, Buchman said the public blockchain effort could serve as a way to bolster the technology it makes available for private solutions.

"We’re hoping to get 20,000 to 200,000 transactions per second on many different applications and […]

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