P2P network solutions startup Marlin Protocol announces Binance Labs investment

Marlin, a scalability solution for decentralized web platforms, spearheaded by industry frontrunners from BitTorrent, Zilliqa, MIT, and Stanford, joins the Binance Labs Incubation Program San Francisco cohort, securing substantial investment from the social impact fund. Rogelio Choy, a former BitTorrent CEO, to join the Marlin advisory board.

Marlin is thrilled to announce its partnership with Binance Labs. Marlin, a scalability and enterprise-level network communication provider, will benefit from the support of Binance Labs as it continues to develop and launch a decentralized Content Delivery Network [CDN] solution.

The CDN solution proposed by Marlin is the Marlin Protocol. Marlin is a peer-to-peer superhighway for public blockchains bringing high-performance network infrastructure to modern decentralized networks. Founded by researchers at Stanford and MIT, Marlin facilitates orders of magnitude improvement in throughput in planet-scale decentralized networks and is currently collaborating with platforms like Holochain, Blockcloud, and several others.

The Marlin project is supported by a strong advisory council, including Rogelio Choy, former CEO of BitTorrent prior to the Tron acquisition.

The ongoing scalability issue

One of the greater challenges for existing network communication workflows, particularly for blockchain-based and distributed ledger-type business platforms, is the fact that most options are squarely centralized.

For example, the Gossip Protocol is a communication structure developed in the 1980s prior to the commonly used by blockchain projects to disseminate information. However, the concept developed in the 1980s, many years before the launch of Web 2.0.

The Gossip Protocol simply sends a block to neighboring users within the network. These users then send blocks to their neighbors. This goes on until the entire network is in possession of the block. Its most obvious flaw is the time it takes to execute the process throughout the network.

The truly debilitating concern with scaling systems like these as well as solutions designed around this type of foundation is the fact that the entire structure is centralized. Due to the centralized nature of these protocols, blocks are susceptible to privacy breaches, censorship, and other security concerns at the mining level.

Marlin Labs co-founder Prateesh Goyal further explains the core incompatibility these solutions face within distributed ledger platforms:

“Censorship is not the only attack possible at the network layer. Relying on centralized entities gives them the ability to extort and cause partitions amongst other vulnerabilities which are a major threat to the security of the network. After all, if censorship was the only attack possible on blockchains, privacy chains like ZCash, Grin and Monero could have scaled to extremely high throughputs by supporting only a few centralized nodes. Trusting a company based on reputation is not an option either.”

A true solution from Marlin

With the backing of Binance Labs, Marlin is developing a networking solution that will offer unlimited consensus nodes, optimizing system throughput as well as availability. On top of this benefit, the Marlin Protocol maintains functionality, ensuring predictable and reliable network performance without the unfortunate networking bottlenecks seen in existing solutions.

The Marlin Protocol is an open-source project. Blockchains can utilize the efficiency of the Marlin Protocol within their own projects, platforms, and decentralized applications. The greater the protocol’s adoption, the higher the incentives for participation. Marlin postulates that all blockchains can benefit from this level of functionality.

According to Ella Zhang, Head of Binance Labs:

“While we’ve seen many innovative consensus algorithms and off-chain techniques in the industry to solve the scalability issue, Marlin is a group of talented entrepreneurs who tackle the underlying network layers scalability through their node network design and crypto-economics. Their fast and decentralized network solution can potentially benefit all blockchains.”