By Kenny Kline – The surge in blockchain-related projects has brought about myriad proposed solutions to everything from decentralized storage and computing to censorship-resistant mediums of value transfer. However, blockchains are still built on the existing Internet stack, something which Marconi, a new networking and distributed ledger protocol, cites as a significant infrastructure vulnerability.

“All these blockchain projects build atop the same network infrastructure consisting of switches and routers connected by Ethernet,” details Jong Kim, Chief Architect of Marconi. “Ethernet is a networking technology that has improved in terms of bandwidth but otherwise has gone relatively unchanged for the past 30 years.”

The problem is that Ethernet was originally designed with connectivity as its foremost consideration, rather than privacy or security, which are usually addressed higher in the Internet’s OSI model — such as TLS and SSL.

However, the lack of inherent privacy and security at the Ethernet level is not the only problem. Read more: