$35 Million: Sequoia, Baidu Back Turing Award Winner's Blockchain Project

A group of university professors and researchers including a Turing award winner have raised $35 million for a non-profit foundation that will support the development of a new blockchain network.

Backers include venture capital firms Sequoia China and Baidu Ventures, crypto mining firm F2Pool and exchange Huobi, as well as Metastable and IMO Ventures.

The goal: roll out a testing environment in February and officially launch a new public blockchain around the third quarter of next year.

The project was co-founded by scholars from the University of Toronto and China's Tsinghua University, including Dr. Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, a Turing Award winner and an information sciences professor at Tsinghua.

Named for renowned mathematician Alan Turing, the Turing award is given out yearly by the Association for Computing Machinery and is considered a kind of Nobel prize for computer science.

Their efforts utilized the code of the bitcoin blockchain but changed the protocol from the Nakamoto consensus model, named for bitcoin's creator, to Conflux's own design.

In an interview with CoinDesk, Dr. Fan Long, a co-founder of the project and an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, said the key design decision that he believes could help to scale public blockchains is to change the way blocks are ordered.

Long said this feature of blockchain results in a bottleneck that is problematic for most public networks, especially those like ethereum that aim to power smart contracts and decentralized applications.

Looking ahead. According to Long, while the foundation utilized most of the original bitcoin blockchain code during its lab experiment, it will develop its own infrastructure for the public launch next year as the team hopes to include smart contract features.

Long went on to say that the end goal is to create a scalable public blockchain with smart contracts that can deliver decentralized applications - and he made a sly dig at ethereum, whose scaling challenges were laid bare a year ago when CryptoKitties clogged that public blockchain network.