It is no secret that the Ethereum ecosystem is broken, especially with the platform being plagued with rising congestion and gas fee issues on a near-daily basis. And while the altcoin’s dev team has been promising big things for many months now, the fact of the matter remains is that an increasing number of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) projects built atop the ecosystem — such as Harvest Finance, Yield.App, Value DeFi — have continued to expand their operations to other blockchains.
Enter, ERGO, an advanced UTXO-based blockchain protocol that has been built to serve as an efficient and secure financial contracts platform offering its users a radical twist to traditional DeFi functionality. It provides a clear solution for Ether’s Gas problem, which in essence, is not really a prerequisite for a smart contract platform if a scripting language is rich enough.
Ergo’s native programming language — aka ErgoScript — enables the development of Turing complete contracts that completely bypass the need for any gas fee while providing other peripheral benefits such as estimation of script complexity before execution, a facet that helps in the active prevention of DoS attacks.
A closer look at what ERGO brings to the table
The number of use cases associated with the decentralized financial (DeFi) ecosystem has been growing at a rapid pace over the last few months, with stablecoins, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and oracle pools being some of the many offshoots to emerge from the fast-evolving space recently.
ERGO’s unique proof of work (PoW) architecture — called Autokylos — coupled with its Turing complete smart contracts ensures that users are provided with seamless access to a number of advanced features including zero-knowledge proofs, adjustable block size, etc.
To further elaborate on what sets Autolykos apart from the rest of the fray is the fact that while most existing PoW protocols feature certain intrinsic drawbacks — for example, they allow ASIC-miners to produce blocks substantially faster than regular CPU-GPU miners — Autokylos does not feature any such potential point of failure, thereby eliminating the advantage that ASICs traditionally hold.
Next-level security privacy and decentralization
One of the core issues currently affecting today’s crypto ecosystem is that of individual privacy, especially when talking about digital currency transactions. However, implementing such measures can not only be quite costly but also require a trusted setup.
That said, ERGO’s native Sigma architecture makes it possible to do such things and much more since it not only allows for a high degree of privacy but also ensuring that the ecosystem’s security is not compromised even in the slightest.
For example, ErgoMixer is a service that can mesh a number of different streams of potentially identifiable cryptos, allowing for the trustless mixing of funds. As a result, users can send their tokens worldwide without anyone knowing the details of their personal transactions.
Backed by some of the industry’s best
The ERGO team features some of the brightest minds operating within the global crypto ecosystem today. Alexander Chepurnoy — aka Kushti — the co-founder of ERGO possesses more than 15 years in software development. Prior to his work with ERGO he served as the co-founder of smartcontract.com (later rebranded as Chainlink) as well as a core developer for the open-source cryptocurrency and payment network NXT.
Dmitry Meshkov, co-founder and a core dev team member for ERGO, holds a Ph.D. in physics and possesses more than a decade worth of experience in software development. In the past, he has worked for a number of prominent crypto projects including Scorex and was even an R&D researcher at IOHK, with his prime focus being the creation of a blockchain prototyping framework.
Other core members of the ERGO team include Alexander Slesarenko, Robert Kornacki, and Mike Askarin, all of whom have previously worked for established tech players including Huawei, Siemens Business Services, Gazprom, and Yandex.
ERGO’s has repeatedly been praised for its novel design and immense potential by many from within the industry, with Charles Hoskinson, co-founder of Ethereum and Cardano, hailing Ergo as “one of the most interesting and exciting projects in the crypto space”. Not only that, Hoskinson has also time and again referred to Chepurnoy as his “favorite technologist”.
