Miller and Viswanath lead effort to design cryptocurrency surpassing Bitcoin

ECE ILLINOIS Assistant Professor Andrew Edmund Miller and Professor Pramod Viswanath is leading a project with professors from six other universities including MIT, Stanford, and the University of California, Berkeley, to create a new digital currency called Unit-e that could potentially process thousands of transactions a second - a speed that Bitcoin users could only dream of.

Unit-E is the first initiative of Distributed Technology Research (DTR), a non-profit foundation formed to develop decentralized technologies. According to an article from Yahoo Finance, "the academics are designing a virtual coin they expect will be able to process transactions faster than even Visa."

According to Viswanath who is a researcher on the project, DTR "deconstructed the blockchain technology that supports most cryptocurrencies and sought to improve almost every element of it." The group initially scoped the limits of the blockchain's performance to operate as close to its limits as possible.

As the head of the Unit-e independent technical steering committee, Miller acknowledges that success for Unit-e is not guaranteed, noting that there is a risk that the new currency could fail to gain traction. Both Miller and Viswanath are affiliated with the CSL. 

Read more about their work at Yahoo Finance.