Newer alternatives, such asĮthereum, gained popularity because they allow for complex “smart contracts”-executable code stored in the blockchain.ĬryptoKitties, if you were to say ‘blockchain,’ everyone would have assumed you’re talking about cryptocurrency”-Bryce BladonĬryptoKitties was among the first projects to harness smart contracts by attaching code to data constructs called tokens, on the Ethereum blockchain. Bitcoin, though popular as an asset and useful for money-like transactions, has limited support for doing anything else. The complexity comes in how blockchains keep the ledger stable and secure without a central authority the details of how that’s done vary among blockchains. At its core, a blockchain is a simple ledger of transactions placed one after another-not unlike a very long Excel spreadsheet. Blockchain technologyĪrguably began with a 1982 paper by the computer scientist David Chaum, but it reached mainstream attention with the success of Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency created by the anonymous person or persons known as Satoshi Nakamoto. Has the world simply moved on to newer blockchain projects? Or is this the fate that awaits all NFTs?īlockchains, smart contracts, and cat genesĬryptoKitties, you have to start at the beginning. “The Merge,” a piece of digital art that sold for the equivalent of $92 million, left Dragon behind as the NFT market surged to record sales, totaling roughly $18 billion in 2021. “When it comes to real applications, scalability and the ability to integrate these devices on top of silicon processors are really challenging issues.”ĭragon was never resold-a strange fate for one of the most historically relevant NFTs ever. “This is the Achilles heel of most of these devices,” Jariwala says. They noted another Chinese group recently achieved similar results with a van der Waals heterostructure made of molybdenum disulfide, hexagonal boron nitride and multi-layer graphene.Ī major question now is whether or not researchers can make such devices on commercial scales. The scientists projected their devices can store data for 10 years. “Memory can become much more powerful when a single device can store more bits of information-it helps build denser and denser memory architectures,” says electrical engineer Deep Jariwala at the University of Pennsylvania, who did not take part in this research. The researchers note their new device could theoretically store multiple bits of data with multiple electric states, each written and erased using a different sequence of voltage pulses. A conventional memory device can store a bit of data, either a zero or one, by switching between, say, a highly electrically conductive state and a less electrically conductive state. These pulses are roughly as strong as those used to write and erase in commercial flash memory.īesides speed, a key feature of this new memory is the possibility of multi-bit storage. A voltage pulse lasting only 21 nanoseconds can inject electric charge into graphene to write or erase data. The researchers fabricated a van der Waals heterostructure consisting of an indium selenide semiconducting layer, a hexagonal boron nitride insulating layer, and multiple electrically conductive graphene layers sitting on top of a wafer of silicon dioxide and silicon. They reasoned that atomically flat van der Waals heterostructures could avoid such problems. Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Physics in Beijing and their colleagues noted that silicon-based memory is ultimately limited in speed because of unavoidable defects on ultra-thin silicon films that degrade performance. These layers are typically held together by weak electric forces known as van der Waals interactions, the same forces that often make adhesive tapes sticky. Previous research found that when two or more atomically thin layers of different materials are placed on top of each other to form so-called heterostructures, novel hybrid properties can emerge. The new device is made of layers of atomically thin 2-D materials. They detailed their findings online this month in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. This makes it thousands of times faster than commercial flash memory and roughly as speedy as the dynamic RAM found in most computers. Now researchers have developed non-volatile memory that only takes nanoseconds to write data. One key weakness of these devices is how they are often slow, typically requiring at least hundreds of microseconds to write data, a few orders of magnitude longer than their volatile counterparts. A 2D cousin of flash memory is not only roughly 5,000 times faster, but can store multiple bits of data instead of just zeroes and ones, a new study finds.įlash drives, hard disks, magnetic tape and other forms of non-volatile memory help store data even after the power is removed.
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