Are hybrid blockchains the silver bullet for enterprises wanting to operate in the blockchain world? Join us and Ben Jessel, Head of Growth at Kadena, as we discuss the merits of hybrid blockchains that take on the best of both permissioned and public blockchains.

 
What is blockchain?
A blockchain is a mechanism to have an immutable record. That record can be a record of ownership record or a record of data that can be shared by everyone. It is distributed, which means there's no single owner. Anyone can write to that blockchain and it iss crypto graphically secured, which means that it is tamper proof.

There are two forms of blockchains. Public and private blockchains, which really is a determinant on how the users of a blockchain are permitted to collaborate on that blockchain itself.

 
About Kadena

Kadena is a blockchain organisation whose mission is to be the first blockchain there's actually ready for business.

Will Martino and Stuart Popejoy are the co-founders of Kadena. Will Martino played a pivotal role in the setup of the securities exchange commissionthat started to oversee aspects of blockchain and then he went to work at JP Morgan Labs. Within that role Will and Stuart interviewed a whole range of stakeholders in 2014 and came to the conclusion that blockchain technology wasn’t ready for prime time utilisation by JP Morgan or any tier one financial institution in terms of speed, security, and scalability.

Will and Stuart used the results of their investigation to build a reference blockchain which ultimately laid the foundations for Quorumand for the launch of the JP Morgan Coina few years later. Will and Stuart left JP Morgan with the open source reference permissioned based blockchain to start Kadena. Now they’re getting ready to launch the public version of this blockchain on the 30thof October thus giving them these two platforms, a public blockchain and a private blockchain, which speak the same language around their smart contract language.

 
Differences between public and private blockchain
What fundamentally differentiates a public and a private blockchain is around who has access to the blockchain and the actions they are allowed to perform. A public blockchain, like Bitcoin, is available to everyone and a new user is able participate in the consensus purely by downloading a wallet and submitting a transaction. As the users are anonymous there are very low levels of trust. The way public blockchains enable transactions to complete without any of that trust, is through mathematics. Its consensus capability is a an incentive model, that de-incentivizes unruly actors by making it very expensive to subvert the blockchain.

In the case of Bitcoin you have proof of work which requires the need to solve a computationally intense mathematical problem, that would cost a lot of money to complete.

Now, as each block is added in compounds the difficulty. So while it may be a little difficult to subvert the most recent block, to subvert one that is 10 blocks behind, you not only have to subvert that block, you have to rewrite history for all the corresponding blocks that come afterwards, which means that they are linked together using this mathematical equation, which is very time and resource intensive. And that becomes incrementally harder over time.

Proof of stake, has a slightly different incentive model, which is about staking money that you could lose i...