Ripple co-founder Larsen invests in new crypto currency from pioneer David Chaum
David Chaum, a pioneer of digital currencies has announced a new blockchain called Elixxir. In a press release, Elixxir’s team stated that Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen and his company H&D Company Ptd. Ltd. will support the project with an investment.
The mission of the new Chaum company is to realize the dream of a fully decentralized digital currency. Elixxir should be able to perform confidential transactions, send transactions reliably within 10 seconds and scale to 100,000 transactions per second. David Chaum, now 63, claims in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that he has achieved nothing less than the holy grail of network decentralization, blockchain security and transaction speed.
David Chaum, the founder of Elixxir, is an American computer scientist and cryptographer who became known for the development of Ecash in 1982, long before Bitcoin was formed. Chaum was regarded in the 80’s as a pioneer of the Cypherpunk movement. He had developed pioneering cryptographic methods in the 80’s, including the Remailer, which cut the link between digital messages. With eCash, he wanted to use this method for digital cash and developed a system that enabled a bank to make transfers with digital money without knowing who was sending what to whom. In May 1994, eCash was launched and received offers from large companies such as Microsoft, Visa and Mastercard. The history of eCash is long and ultimately unsuccessful. ECash failed. Many have explained this by the fact that the system still required an intermediary (third party). Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of Bitcoin, was also of this opinion. Here Satoshi started and invented the blockchain.
Elixir
Now many years after the failure of eCash, David Chaum seems to want to make a new attempt to revolutionize digital cash. Elixxir started its development cycle in early 2016, as the press release notes. Development began in stealth mode to keep them secret.
The special thing about Elixxir is that it implements a reversal of the traditional blockchain model, where transactions are grouped into blocks and then processed by validating nodes. Chaum said that instead blocks will be produced before transaction batching, so that the network can process payments quickly, even on a large scale. Whether the high promises can be fulfilled remains to be seen. Elixxir is currently in alpha status. A beta test version is scheduled for release in the 2nd quarter of 2019.
Meanwhile, the Company has announced a financing round by leading figures from both Asia and the United States, led by Chris Larsen’s company, H&D Company Ptd Ltd. According to Larsen and his company, they value Chaum’s experience.
H&D Company Pte Ltd. spoke enthusiastically about the investment:
H&D Company Pte Ltd and Elixxir are working together to give everyone the opportunity to build assets by investing in products that are currently out of reach. We value David Chaum’s experience and innovation in cryptography and his shared vision to create a more dynamic and sustainable future.
Larsen agreed with a similar opinion and said:
David Chaum has been a privacy defender in the digital world for nearly forty years. I am proud to be an early supporter of Elixxir and look forward to this consumer-oriented blockchain opening the door to ensure use by millions of people in their daily lives.
Within just 10 days of launch, Elixxir is expected to have over 1,500 prospects for running Elixxir network nodes, while over 500 developers have expressed interest in developing distributed applications on Elixxir.
