BitMex's 100x Group has awarded
its last Bitcoin development grant of the year. The company has awarded
a grant valued at $40,000 to Calvin Kim for his Bitcoin scalability
solution, Utreexo — a project originally created by Tadge Dryja from the
MIT Digital Currency Initiative.

Bitcoin's protocol checks every
proposed transaction to make sure that the sender has enough coins to
complete the request. All unspent Bitcoin (BTC) is
saved in what is known as UTXO, or Unspent Transaction Outputs. While
the entire Bitcoin blockchain is currently around 300 GB, the UTXO is
only 4 GB. MIT researchers have claimed that as the network grows, this
may one day present a bottleneck of its own.

With Utreexo, the
person holding the funds specified in a particular transaction maintains
the full UTXO data themself, proving that the funds exist. When they
want to spend coins from their wallet, they present proof of their
validity in the form of a hash, which takes up a lot less space than the
original data. This, in turn, makes the protocol more scalable without
sacrificing security, according to the project's researchers.

This solution is reminiscent of the "fast catch up" concept recently proposed by Algorand.
It is worth noting, however, that Bitcoin purists tend to be skeptical
of any scalability solutions that seek to replace full nodes with hashes
or zero-knowledge proofs. 

source link : https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitmex-awards-its-last-developer-grant-to-a-bitcoin-scalability-solution-from-mit