You Won't Have to Wait for This Ethereum Scaling Solution, It Works Now

While a number of scaling technologies are in the works, blockchain company OpenST thinks it's new protocol, Mosaic, is ready to tackle those issues "Here and now, rather than just many years into the future," according to Jason Goldberg, the CEO of OpenST. In an exclusive interview with CoinDesk after the project was first revealed at ethereum hackathon ETHBerlin, Goldberg highlighted that Mosaic requires no fundamental changes to the underlying ethereum network to deploy.

Once fully tested, Mosaic could then act as a scaling solution used in advance of other proposed solutions, such as sharding and zk-snarks, which require changes to the ethereum blockchain, dubbed layer-one, as opposed to changes on off-chain auxiliary systems running on a secondary layer atop ethereum.

This is done through what Bollen describes as the "Gateway protocol." In effect, any ERC-20 token, which is the widely held standard for new forms of cryptocurrency on ethereum, is able to move through the gateway protocol including OpenST's Simple Token - which raised more than $20 million in an ICO fundraise last year - and client-specific tokens based upon OST. As a company that services non-blockchain enterprises with comprehensive tokenization services, Mosaic assists developers building token-based economies on ethereum to scale to millions of end-users in the immediate before ethereum's formal scaling roadmap executes.

Secondly, Mosaic reduces transaction costs, expending smaller amounts of gas, which is the computational unit of work on ethereum.

Stepping back, to understand how the protocol works it's helpful to note what work Mosaic builds upon - the work of Buterin and ethereum researcher Virgil Griffith.

Calling the seminal work an "Eye-opener," Bollen described to CoinDesk that in order to increase the capacity of the network in finalizing transactions, the Mosaic protocol essentially created an "Opt-in system" for developers to transfer and fully complete the bulk of computational work required off-chain, before committing these transactions back to the ethereum blockchain in batches.

In addition to being immediately useful in the short-term, Bollen posits that Mosaic will act as an important "Testing ground" for ethereum.

Image courtesy of OpenST. Though the underlying ethereum blockchain itself is "Severely limited in its capacity," with Mosaic's token sharding process, the capacity of the mainnet to finalize transactions at any given time is multiplied.

According to Bollen, pushing Mosaic as a broader scaling solution is simply about making ethereum "More secure for the future" and giving it "a much longer runway and viability to change the Internet and the way we organize."

"It's not about one approach being right or wrong. It's about having a community body of work that is both improving the ethereum origin chain, as well as, providing options to how to scale on existing ethereum."