Norbert Goffa has come a long way. Born and bred in Hungary, he started his career in home appliance sales 15 years ago. Today, he is a co-founder of a successful international blockchain project that is getting Best Technology awards and certificates all over the world.
For the last decade, blockchain technology has been associated with crypto industry – but Goffa and his team at ILCoin believe that it can be of much more use to the world. Lay a secure foundation for an official digital currency? Control genuine medicament supplies? Build a new generation data storage system that keeps all the information secure from leaks, hacks and losses? All that, and much more. Blockchain has all the potential to revolutionize the very concept of data transmission and storage.
ILCoin development team take the industry’s problems one by one and find solutions to them. Earlier this year, they have introduced C2P technology that was designed to protect their system from hacks. Now they are working on RIFT protocol – a brand new way to scale up blockchain networks and safely store large files of any type within the system.
In this interview, Norbert tells us about their past and future developments, how blockchain can change our world to the best, and technological and ideological challenges the team is facing on the way to reaching their big goal.
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What inspired you to create your project?
First of all, let me clarify that I am not the sole inventor of ILCoin. The ideas behind all our technologies – including but not limited to C2P and RIFT – belong to the developers. Together as a team, we have come up with the way to overcome the tight limits of blockchain technology and pave the way for the widespread utilization of blockchain.
Our most significant motivation was the current state of the blockchain market. It is lacking security, and utilization opportunities for this technology are extremely poor. The use of cryptocurrencies has been tightly connected with exchange speculation, and, unfortunately, there are no real commercial and technology values. On the other hand, we do believe in blockchain technology. I can see many ways of how it can improve many industries even outside the crypto space.
So ILCoin’s main objective and the main intention of our current and future developments is to exploit the maximum of both cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. No other project has been able to do that so far – which also makes it a very interesting challenge for us.
How will our world look like when blockchain is fully adopted? Will we be paying for everything with cryptocurrencies?
I don’t want to make predictions because there are many factors that can influence the outcome of blockchain adoption. But yes, I believe that one day all financial transactions will be run on a blockchain basis.
Currently, it is difficult to even agree on what we consider to be a blockchain. The market has drifted away from the very principles that Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto once set. Today, it is full of easy and quick solutions, yet they cannot satisfy the basic requirements of security and reliability.
Going back to your original question, we should first find our way back to the primary idea blockchain. Once we do, I am convinced that this technology will serve as the backbone for the economy of the future. With blockchain fully adopted, it will be possible to create huge media libraries to share information between universities, to create useful tools for effective and convenient control of any supply chain, to store and transfer any kind and volume of data quickly and without losses – there are so many opportunities. But there are a few issues we need to face before we get there.
Which problems stand in the way of these changes?
There are countless challenges associated with blockchain. An easy-to-use feature is of great value, but it comes with a price. Unfortunately, there have been many successful hacking attacks, which can be explained by the lack of well-structured systems. One real problem is that neither exchanges nor blockchain projects pay enough attention to security. Another problem is scalability – when blockchain networks grow to a certain point, they lose in transaction speed. This is a technical limitation of the technology the developers tried to overcome for years.
As you can see, in order to successfully replace the current financial system by cryptocurrencies, many improvements must be made. Digital currencies have several limitations that we still need to overcome if we are talking about the wide utilization of these technologies. However, there is nothing wrong with it. I think that the whole technology is still in its early stages and we are one of those unique projects that do everything in its power to make sure that the technology becomes worthy of being widely accepted.
How are you going to solve these problems with your new technologies?
Right now we are working on RIFT protocol, designed to solve the scalability problem and allow us to store large amounts of data in the blockchain without losing on network speed. RIFT will disrupt the very concept or safe and efficient data storage.
To achieve that, our developers had to think out-of-the-box and reorganize the very structure of blockchain. Today, most of blockchains operate on a single level. We introduced the second layer of mini-blocks that extends the network, potentially eliminating any scale limitations. I’d compare this architecture to how fractals replicate.
And, of course, we had to create a secure base for our project to work on. It’s what our C2P consensus was built for.
Tell us a bit more about C2P. How safe is your system?
There is a common threat to crypto space known as 51% attack. In short, it means that if hackers own more than half of the computing power of the network, they can change the data and transactions at their will. This problem has become even more pressing as there are many companies doing research on quantum processors now – those will be way more powerful than any processor we have now.
To protect our system from this kind of threat, and that is how we created C2P: the certified consensus algorithm that determines how ILCoin’s network works and validates the blocks in our blockchain. It is one-of-a-kind solution that uses a complex system of trusted computers and digital signatures, so no matter how much computing power the hackers might have – we are well protected. With C2P, we know we have a secure base for our next developments.
What will be your next step after RIFT release?
RIFT is a huge step forward. It creates the foundation of worldwide blockchain utilization. I believe that its release will mark the new era of most significant technological innovations will begin.
Our next step will be DCB, also known as Decentralized Cloud Blockchain, the data storage system of the future. It is a solution that allows for storing files, videos, and images on a blockchain basis. The essence of it is to have the data within the block rather than storing it outside the blockchain; off-chain data storage is not safe. Obviously, it has its benefits from a cost perspective, and it’s also true that you do not have to store everything inside the blockchain. However, there are profoundly important documents, records that already should be stored on-chain.
As all our important data is being moved into the cloud, security and safety are becoming more and more significant. At ILCoin, we believe that the solution lies in the blockchain technology, and we work hard to meet this increasing demand. In regards to trust, blockchain utilization could bring about substantial improvements for cryptocurrencies, too. This is our vision. We are glad to be at the forefront of blockchain development and contribute to making this promising future a reality.
