Privacy on the blockchain is another critical issue that needs to be addressed. For example, the financial sector is so heavily regulated that customer privacy must be preserved at all cost and sensitive information can be shared only with regulators on a need-to-know basis. Similarly, many corporations interested in deploying blockchain technology in their internal processes probably wouldn't like their business secrets to be recorded on a transparent and immutable public ledger. The same goes for the private financial dealings of many high-profile or high-net-worth individuals. Privacy is highly valued in the internet age and blockchains must be able to provide this option to users if they are to achieve mass adoption.
Now that we have defined the main issues, let's look at their potential solutions. At the forefront of blockchain innovation, we have novel consensus algorithms such as Proof-of-Stake and its variations, as well as other cutting-edge technologies such as lightning networks, state channels, side-chains, sharding, plasma, multi-layer protocols, atomic swaps, and decentralized exchanges to name a few. We'll look into them in more detail in the following sections. They are being developed both as solutions for upgrading existing blockchain protocols such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, and as foundations of the architecture of newly emerging blockchain protocols such as Cardano, Tezos, EOS, Polkadot, Cosmos, Icon, Wanchain, RChain, Aion, Zilliqa, and many others:
It's getting very, very interesting! We are going to have a sneak peek into Blockchain 3.0! Stay tuned!