The competition on the infrastructure blockchain project is growing fast. Many projects try to solve issues of transaction speed and transaction costs, to let blockchain technology become mainstream. The current low throughput of the most common blockchain protocols and cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum), nearly 10-30 transactions per second (TPS), does not match with the world's commerce needs at all. In contrast, Visa claims to have 56,000 TPS on its network, while Alipay has achieved 200,000 peaks TPS in November 2017. The scalability problem of the current blockchain-based systems poses significant limits for their extensive applications.
In order to solve scalability problem without compromising its security and decentralization, several projects have already launched the alternative protocols that aim to significantly increase the throughput of the blockchain protocols. For instance, EOS launched its infrastructure for dApps, which Test Network can sustain over 10,000 TPS. EOS raised $197M during its ICO in June 2017 and now is the one of the largest cryptocurrency in the world by market cap. IOTA is able to process 500-800 TPS, raised $400M and now 11th by market cap in the world of cryptocurrencies.
Moreover, classical blockchains could create new versions with substantially higher TPS (Sharding, Plasma, State Channels, Lightning Network), as a result, the unique value of Purple would be smaller.
Purple will allow companies to integrate the purple blockchain protocol into their operations. Additionally, Purple ecosystem will allow issuing own custom tokens that could be sold to investors, without writing a single line of code. It will be also possible to issue self-enforcing contracts. With the current architecture, Purple claims it can process more than a million transactions per second assuming there are more than a hundred active miners. This is made possible by dividing the ledger into shards each of which has it's own consensus algorithm and set of participating nodes. With the current unoptimized code, the consensus algorithm can process ~13000 transactions per second. However, the test public testnet is not available so it is not possible to test these statements.
In Purple, multiple currencies/assets are handled at the protocol level. For example, transaction and smart contract fees can be paid in any listed currency if the miners accept it. This also means that a decentralized exchange between all listed currencies can exist at the protocol layer.
Currently, Purple is in development and the project will soon enter the testnet phase. Purple Mainnet Launch is planned for February 1st, 2019. Crowdasle is expected in late 2018.
Purple proposes its own approach to mining. To compare, in Bitcoin, miners approve transactions by providing a valid Proof of Work and by choosing a number of pending transactions to be written in the ledger. While this works, it also means that the main bottleneck is the Proof of Work algorithm. In Purple, miners who provide a valid Proof of Work are eligible to approve transactions in a designated period. During that period they broadcast network events that include the transactions that they wish to approve. After the period has ended they will be required to issue a leave event which transfers all of the fees of the transactions to the address chosen by the miner. If a miner crashes or behaves maliciously during it's designated period, it will be removed by the other participants and will lose all of it's collected fees.
Currently, the amount of required funds has not been published.
The expected token distribution will allocate 25% of tokens for the crowdsale, 15% will be kept in reserve, 40% will be distributed to miners, 8% will be kept for founders, 2% for bounties, and 10% for early contributors. There is no information about the token lockup schemes for the different token-holders.
The use of proceeds distribution is not given.
Currently, there is no information about the team members on Purple website. It can be seen from social media and GitHub that now there are at least two people contributing to Purple. They are Octavian Oncescu (Founder) and Tudor Gheorghiu (Lead Developer at Prodicode). Only Octavian is mentioned as an employee of Purple on Linkedin, the role of Tudor in the project is unclear. Purple team told that detailed information about the team will be soon published on the website.