Vite AMA Recap

Let me answer this question from a few angles. The first, from the payment side (this is the scope where our businesses overlap); Second, what Vite is doing beyond payment; Third, a deep dive into the DAG (since this is a DAG contest after all).

In terms of the payment business:

Our payment network is already put to use in POS machines at Singaporean merchants such as Ce La Vi Sky Bar and taxi services under the Midwest Global network. To achieve this distribution, we have partnership with Alchemy, the subsidiary of one of Asia’s largest payment companies QFPay. These are settled deals with actual, large merchants; and not plans.

In line with the ethos of decentralization and blockchain, our payment network does not require KYC. Our understanding is that COTI requires KYC. 

Transactions on Vite network are free (although one can hold more VITE to increase his quota for transactions). COTI charges fees.

From a more general perspective:

1. We offer more than just payment, which is COTI’s bread and butter. We have DEX, multi-chain wallet, tokenization, and government blockchain solutions. And none of these are plans. They have all been launched. 

2. Our release curve is healthy, with a modest 11.90% release in the next two years. COTI’s circulating supply will 4x in this period.

3. Software development – On Github, our code base has 29 watchers, 216 stars and 100 forks. These numbers are near zero for COTI.

4. Our Telegram groups cover nearly 20 languages and geographies, and we’re active on Wechat / Discord. COTI has much weaker following than us.

And lastly from a DAG comparison angle:

DAG comes in many flavors. The basic form is “tangle”. New transactions append to the tangle under a parent selection algorithm. However, it’s error-prone, especially in heavy usage scenarios. 

COTI takes a tangle-based DAG as ledger. New transactions in COTI will choose 2 prior transactions as parent according an algorithm based on “Trust Score”. This brings problem, because COTI assumes users should have a high Trust Score to enable fast transaction settlement and confirmation, newbies with low Trust Score may attempt to send a transaction but never have it confirmed by enough subsequent transaction, or has to wait for a long time, resulting in high latency. 

Moreover, since the number of transactions having low Trust Score will increase slowly on their sub-trees, this cause vulnerability because hackers are easily to temper with them by creating a group of false transactions having longer subsequent transactions. At last, there is no “global time” in tangle, which is indispensable to enable smart contract on DAG. Many tangle projects will invent a sophisticated algorithm to calculate a “Master Chain” in the DAG, but this is also error-prone and increases the complexity of design. 

Vite doesn’t take tangle as the DAG ledger, but chooses “block-lattice”, a well-structured DAG ledger where every account has its own chain, aka “Account Chain”, and every smart contract has a “Contract Chain”. This design guarantees the order of transactions in the account, and is essential for smart contract. This design is clear and lightweight by decoupling the complexity of roll-back handling and expanding scalability. Vite also has a Snapshot Chain. The snapshot chain takes “Snapshots” from DAG ledger every second, and is responsible for the final confirmation of the DAG. The Snapshot Chain provides a global time, and solved the vulnerability of the DAG.