RChain is a token platform. It is an open source project, forked from Ethereum, initially launched by the RChain Cooperative, an open community formed in January 2017. Today RChain has 46 independent contributors.
The main purpose of RChain was to add scalability to public blockchains. For example, in Bitcoin every single transaction is shared with every single member of the chain. Instead of storing the ledger, RChain stores a state of a virtual computer. Also instead of using Proof-of-Work,Show more [+] ich is very expensive due to the required computing power and a lot of electricity consumed, RChain uses a Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. For applications RChain uses Smart Contracts. These smart contracts can be written on Rholang and have to follow formal verification methods for better scalability. Also unlike Ethereum, RChain uses a sharding algorithm (Rho Calculus), which divides the whole network in pieces, so that computers from home network will share all the transactions only in their sub-chain. These pieces are called Rho Virtual Machines (RhoVM). One node can be part of multiple sub-chains.
Developers of RChain position their product as Facebook and Visa at the same time. RChain had private ICO in August-September 2017 which raised 30M USD. Finally, RChain developers plan to start several native economic tokens. One has already been launched already coin called Revenu (REV).