Saito – a first principles approach to blockchain scaling.

Saito is a new kind of blockchain. One with genuine solutions to on-chain scaling. It achieves this by taking a first principles approach, looking to the economics and logistics of building a scaleable blockchain, before getting carried away with clever technical solutions and workarounds.
Early bitcoiners can remember ‘playing’ with bitcoin. For a lot of us, we learned about the technology and it’s capabilities playing dice or adding a little graffiti. Since its inception the Ethereum chain has expanded what we think possible of blockchains and unleashed a universe of tokens and associated projects.
Scaling, or difficulties in scaling, long ago killed the bitcoin blockchain game, has caused massive fissures in the community and hampered progress with uptake of blockchain solutions for payments, smart contracts and applications.
This crisis of scaling coincides with the emergence of Distributed or Blockchain applications that promise to reshape the internet, breaking up many incumbent business models.These are fast pushing to the top of the most popular and hyped projects in the space. Approaches to scaling vary:

• hierarchies or layers of blockchains
• building complex off-chain infrastructures and using the chain minimally
• creating a core of centralised super-nodes do the heavy lifting
• off-loading the problem to Ethereum

Saito takes a different, first principles, approach. Namely, a highly capable network must reward all participants for their contribution to the network. And, the distribution of this reward cannot be imposed on the network by fiat, or by algorithms; it must be an equilibrium ‘found’ by economic forces between the participants.
The result of this approach is a new kind of chain and consensus mechanism: Proof of Transactions. One that addresses theses real, pre-technical, challenges for Blockchain Scaling: properly pricing transactions (data storage over time), and properly rewarding participation (network routing).  The Whitepaper and different sections on this site go into detail on how Saito implements this, and the technical challenges to come.
Saito’s solutions to these problems possess some radical notions in Blockchain. The most notable of these are chain permanence and concentrating all reward for network participation on ‘miners’ (or stakers). The result or this work is a massively scalable blockchain – that can handle very large amounts of data on-chain.
The success of Saito’s approach is demonstrated by the simplicity and compactness of it’s code base. With something similar in scope to Bitcoin’s early codebase Saito creates a public man-in-the-middle resistant PKI system with routing and data persistence build in. And this, makes building distributed apps, from payment channels, to social networks, simple, and free from the need for central owners or operators. We are very excited about what this means for blockchain and distributed applications, and networking in general. We believe that it represents a major challenge and alternative to the current internet content-advertising industry, the way that bitcoin challenges banking. And this is only the start.