Dann Toliver, Chief Technology Officer of Toda.Network and Co-Author of the TODA Protocol, explains the history and greater purpose of the TODA Protocol in this interview.
Several years ago, Dann and Toufi were building applications in the security and privacy space for purposes such as email, WebRTC (real-time communication) and others. And as they were doing this, they sought to find ways to reduce the trust barriers between the participating parties and the providers providing the services.
They did not just want to say: trust us - but instead be able to say: come and validate this.
While working with various types of blockchain, they ran into the same issues consistently when trying to scale up:
Transaction throughput
Latency
Cost per transaction
With this in mind, TODA came from a place of trying to solve these technical issues - starting with value transfer. The fundamental insight was that those problems could not be solved with a ledger. And while a ledger can be useful - it is not useful or necessary for everything.
Building a decentralized value-exchange mechanism without a ledger was the first step.
On the societal side, Dann explains that it was important to him and Toufi to look at cash-primary regional economies and try to understand how they could build something that could supplement cash, to help these regions prosper just by using the mobile devices that people have in a way that offers properties similar to cash such as:
Scalability
Privacy
No latency
No value extraction from regional economies
With this, it could also enable financial services to supplement cash in these economies to help enable true prosperity in these regions.
Watch the interview to learn more about the history of TODA and the team’s vision for the future it could help to enable.