After a year on its testnet, the VeriBlock blockchain went live yesterday on the Bitcoin mainnet, allowing exchanges, wallet providers, merchants and other crypto businesses to leverage Bitcoin’s robust blockchain security.Now that it’s live on the mainnet, VeriBlock’s model extends the Bitcoin blockchain’s security protection from 51-percent attacks to non-Bitcoin blockchains by linking them to the Bitcoin blockchain, offering it as a security backstop.How Does VeriBlock Work?VeriBlock allows any blockchain to inherit the full proof-of-work security of Bitcoin using a novel consensus protocol — proof of proof — which records snapshots of any given blockchain and embeds them (in an aggregated form) in Bitcoin transactions, allowing the former to inherit the latter’s security characteristics.These snapshots can be automatically referenced by the protocol in the event of a 51-percent attack to determine the correct chain. The presence of conflicting snapshots for a particular “altchain” triggers early attack detection (EAD) metrics, which warns users about the potential rewrite before they confirm the transaction and updates them when the transaction is safe to accept.VeriBlock uses OP_RETURN — a type of bitcoin transaction that is used for embedding data on the blockchain. It can be used for anything from proving the existence of some data at a specific point in time (proof of existence) to issuing new assets, all on top of t...
