II. Tectum History

1. History of blockchain

Tectum’s history started in the 1980s with one of the project’s core developers who worked on software for use in submarines. The computer infrastructure used in submarines needs to have sufficient redundancy built into its design to ensure it remains operational even during partial flooding of the vessel if in an emergency causing water damage happens at multiple sites at once. These early systems had some of the properties of a distributed ledger as they needed to be self-healing, redundant and decentralized. After the arrival of blockchains in 2009, the Tectum team realized that it had a relatively superior understanding of distributed ledger technology based on this experience compared to the rest of the nascent blockchain community.

The Tectum project was fortunate in that it did not have to start development of its technologies from scratch after CrispMind Co-founder Alex Guseff acquired the intellectual property associated with these early designs. In addition, the project has the experience of Dimity Stakheev, a core developer of these submarine systems who remains on board with Tectum. This long history is the reason that the Tectum blockchain is written in Delphi, as it is one of the oldest and most powerful coding languages. CrispMind Co-Founder Alex Guseff was looking for ways to implement a commercial product based on Tectum, and the SoftNote was the eventual fruition of this undertaking, combining cutting edge blockchain design, with extremely efficient early distributed ledger designs.

2. Strengths of the Tectum protocol

The first strength of the Tectum blockchain lies in its unique block formation protocol, and from the beginning, it was decided that there would be no mining required in the blockchain in order to avoid transaction ‘clustering’. Clustering in this context refers to the way that traditional blockchains such as Bitcoin, transactions build up over time before being released in one go after the block time has elapsed, creating a bottleneck in chain performance. Mining would mean that transactions cannot be validated until a miner has won its next block, therefore slowing network finality down drastically. From day one, the team was convinced that the transaction flow must be even and without clustering into blocks waiting for a given block time to elapse. For example, users must wait up to 10 minutes for a Bitcoin block to be mined before a transaction can be included. The solution was that the premise of the blockchain should be 1 transaction per block, (TPB) meaning that transactions could flow at a regular pace throughout the network without clustering and waiting for finalisation. Terminal performance, (network speed) therefore becomes easier to calculate and measure than under traditional blockchain design.

The next core strength is network mapping. Looking at the Bitcoin network, the Tectum team realised that waiting for 6 confirmations for a transaction to be final was excessively redundant, with all Bitcoin network participants doing unnecessary work. Whilst this creates optimal security for the Bitcoin network, Tectum is intended to be an extremely rapid overlay network and thus must take a different approach to finalisation. When a Bitcoin node broadcasts a transaction, it broadcasts to all the nodes connected to the broadcasting node propagating outwards and transaction confirmations keep accruing for days after a transaction is made. In the Tectum network, a rigid network map is created by an Elect Node each network cycle, which is 200 milliseconds, gives every node a clear instruction as to which other node is its closest peer, eliminating redundancy. By implementing this method Tectum dramatically decreased its network load and improved overall system performance.

The next core strength is the network protocol. This proprietary system allows data to be transmitted over the network with superior capacity. This relates to a way of transmitting an instruction to nodes as to how to reconstruct the next block from the previous block rather than transmitting the raw contents and is discussed in depth later in this paper. Under this system a four-digit integer allows you to recreate an 11-digit number.

The final core strength of the Tectum blockchain is its NoSQL search engine built into the chain architecture which allows enormous amounts of data to be split and stored in a distributed fashion, and simultaneously queried and retrieved faster than a traditional relational database. This aspect is discussed in more detail later in this whitepaper.