- Electra Protocol aims to develop a global cryptocurrency payment network with high TPS and low gas fees.
- It has integrated lightning networks to further address its scalability.
The cryptocurrency ecosystem is evolving at a rapid speed and has presented several use cases since its launch. With it bringing a revolution in the gaming, NFT, and metaverse sectors, it still lacks in the very domain for which it was developed, the payments network. The high network congestion causes slow transaction speeds, high gas fees, and long finality time, which poses a challenge for everyday users and merchants to fully adopt the crypto ecosystem.
Moreover, the traditional payment system of banks and other financial institutions has its flaws. The high currency conversion rates, waiting for days for transaction approval, and the difficulty to make micro-payments, all add up to trouble casual users even more.
The Electra Protocol intends to create a global payment system that has kept users at the forefront and changed the way normal people see crypto and blockchain payments through all developmental stages.
The Electrifying Electra Protocol
The open-source blockchain project was launched on January 2021 and targeted the traditional payment system. This blockchain is in contrast to other networks. It is not publicly funded and did not offer an ICO.
The protocol is based on Proof-of-Stake (specifically PoS version 3.0e) which prevents any malicious user to launch a 51% attack, which they can do by gaining a majority. It also protects the network against staking weights and introduces the concept of transaction depths.
The block and staking rewards are randomized and the chances of a transaction being chosen depends on its transaction depth. The network encourages more users to stay on the network which will increase their chance of being randomly selected and earning the block reward. The staking reward for a user is calculated by the following formulae:
Staking reward = ( 3% * Coins in the selected transaction) * ( Days unspent / 365)
Days unspent refers to the number of days the transaction was unspent or staked which must be less than 30 days.
The network has a TPS of 1600 which account for its unparalleled transaction confirmation time of 80s. The receiver’s wallet almost instantly received the transactions and they are spendable as soon as they are recorded on the blockchain. The gas fee charged is just 0.0002 XEP which makes it negligible and it takes 5000 transactions to make the total gas fees as 1XEP. The protocol is built on the SHA 256 algorithm making it secure, safe, and instantly accessible. The source codes have been developed by experienced volunteer developers.
The Lightning Network (LN) was launched by Lightning Labs to provide scalability solutions to blockchains by increasing their TPS. The Electra Protocol has introduced LN into its ecosystem, making it reach a TPS of 1500+. The number is to go even higher with further developments paving the way for the network to transform into a global currency accepted by mass. The integration of SegWit and XEP has further improved the network scalability and together with the LN, the protocol can grow without the need of any hard fork.Â
The ElectraPay product allows merchants to easily accept XEP payments. The core application and all the transaction databases are stored on the cloud-service provider AWS (Amazon Web Services), which offers a promised scalable bandwidth in the future and a certainty to users and merchants that the network is reliable.
A unique feature of the protocol is that it is not backed by a company or individuals, rather it is driven by an NGO named Electra Foundation. It was founded in the beginning of 2022 and is based in Tallinn (Estonia, Europe). Some of its work includes managing the Electra Protocol website, the Electra Foundation website, code repositories on GitHub, and XEP block explorer.
Final Thoughts
The XEP is the native token of the platform and a total of 3 Billion tokens were pre-mined at the end of 2020. As it is based on PoS, it leaves less carbon footprint than other algorithms while making it environment-friendly.
