Original author: Ray
Original source: ArkStream Capital
The environment of the new public chain
If there is a law of gravity in the blockchain world, then currently, Bitcoin and Ethereum are like the two brightest stars, lighting up this bright star field. And the reason why they are able to stand out among the stars and shine brightly is that they have their own original technology implementation (that is, blockchain and smart contract platforms), as well as continuous iterative upgrades over the years. The accumulation has resulted in a huge market value, a prosperous ecology and an active community.
In the past, during the cryptocurrency cycle from 2017 to 2021, we often heard the term Ethereum killer. Many new public chains aimed to surpass Ethereum and proposed their own technical architecture and implementation plans. For example, proposed Solana with Proof of History, Avalanche with Avalanche protocol and subnet function, NEAR with sharding technology, Flow with separation of consensus and calculation, EOS with parallel processing and asynchronous communication capabilities, IOTA with DAG transaction structure , as well as Polkadot and Cosmos with native built-in multi-chain support. It has to be said that they have all achieved success in data indicators such as on-chain user daily activity, DApps development, and TVL within a specific period of time. However, with different reasons (such as the team lying flat and the collapse of the capital, etc.) and the rollup of Ethereum’s second layer being launched one after another, the situation is quietly changing. The most obvious thing is that in DeFiLlama’s public chain TVL rankings, Arbitrum and Optimism came from behind Overrides most of Alt L1. In addition, some innovative projects have also migrated their focus to the Rollup Layer 2 network. The most representative example is the migration from Avalanche to Arbitrums derivative platform GMX.
At the current moment, the stable development of Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as the rapid growth of the second-layer network, are obviously squeezing the once bustling Alt-L1 market.Many Alt-L1 projects seem to be in a stagnation bottleneck period, which indicates an unoptimistic future for the new public chain. Take the new public chains Aptos and Sui of the Move series in the past year as examples. The markets response to them has changed dramatically. Before the mainnet was launched, everyone was keen on in-depth interpretation of their white papers and technical architecture, and made wonderful assumptions about their application scenarios. Developers frantically learned new contract languages and DApps project parties competed for various ecological niches of new public chain DApps. However, after the public chain mainnet was launched, especially after the token issuance, with the downturn of the DApps ecosystem and the sluggish TVL data, everything seemed to be far away from us again.
PS: Considering that privacy public chains emphasize anonymity and protecting user privacy, and storage public chains emphasize decentralized storage, their design concepts and technical routes are somewhat different from general public chains. In order to make the discussion more focused and in-depth, we will not discuss privacy public chains and storage public chains for the time being.
The necessity of new public chain research and development
It can be said with certainty that it is undoubtedly a challenging undertaking to develop and launch a new public chain to challenge the two giants of Bitcoin and Ethereum, or even the new and strong second-tier network. This makes us think about a question: Is it necessary to continue to develop new public chains?
The answer is yes. From the perspective of Mass Adoption, from 2020 to the present, the entire Web3 has a variety of new application scenarios such as DeFi, NFT, and Metaverse, and the popularity of users has risen to millions or even tens of millions. Compared with those technologies that have already implemented Mass Adoption, such as search engines and instant messaging, Web3 still has huge room for development. If we compare the infrastructure public chain of Web3 with traditional cloud computing, then the number of applications and users of public chain services is still in the stage of rapid development, far from reaching the mature stage of large-scale application. Therefore, the future market pie will be huge and demand will change rapidly, which will lead to the emergence of public chains with excellent service capabilities and response speed. At present, in the field of public chains, those who have taken the lead and gained wide recognition and market share It is Bitcoin and Ethereum, but this does not mean that other Alt-L1 and new public chains have no room for survival and no opportunities to overtake in certain segments.Because of this, institutions are willing to invest a large amount of funds in the field of public chains, not purely out of financial investment considerations, but decisions based on judgments about the future of Web3 and the importance of public chains.
Hard power and soft power
When we study and analyze public chains, we can evaluate them from two aspects: hard power and soft power. Hard power mainly focuses on the technical innovations involved in the public chain, such as P2P network, consensus mechanism, block data structure, smart contract language and virtual machine, token economy, etc., as well as the ability to adapt to the technological development route and the status quo. Soft power involves more aspects such as business operation capabilities, ecological construction and capital coordination. In the process of RD, implementation and development of public chains, these two strengths are indispensable. If you only have hard power but lack soft power, you will easily fall into the dilemma of working behind closed doors; if you only have soft power but lack hard power, you will not get far.
In terms of hard power, Alt-L1 is prone to technical inertia and stubbornness, which is why we emphasizeTechnology development route and the ability to adapt to the current situation. Not long after Bitcoin was founded by Satoshi Nakamoto, the development of the entire network and community was Organic. When it comes to major functional changes and new functional support, the overall progress will be slow and conservative, but now it is also beginning to keep up with the times. For example, the recent Fiery Ordinals deal. Before Ethereums expansion plan officially entered Rollup as the center, the Plasma plan was once popular. In the new version of the development roadmap announced by Ethereum last year, we can see that the focus of the protocol level is mainly on the optimization of the security and decentralization of the PoS consensus mechanism, the combination of data sharding and Rollup, and the original goal of eWASM and state Sharding has been replaced by other functions.
Exploration of innovative technologies
When Ethereum’s Frontier was launched in 2015, it provided a basically usable network, including features such as PoW consensus mechanism, transaction, account model, and core EVM smart contract platform. Since then, Ethereum has been iteratively upgraded for many years. For example: Homestead that is more stable and efficient in 2016, Metropolis Byzantium that supports ZK-Snarks proof chain verification through pre-compiled contracts in 2017, Beacon Chain that supports PoS function in 2020, and the market-based transaction fee model EIP-1559 that will be introduced in 2021 The London Hard Fork will officially close PoW and open the Paris upgrade of PoS (ETH Merge) in 2022. Adhering to the spirit of openness and freedom of the blockchain, Ethereum started with rich programmability, and has never stopped. It has been upgraded time and time again in the past, showing the continuous development of a public chain on the road of innovative technology exploration.
Because of this, whether we are focusing on new public chains that have not yet been launched in the primary market, or old public chains that have been keen on the secondary market for a long time, those new and old public chains that have the courage to explore innovative technologies are worthy of our attention and learning.
Next, let’s ignore the pros and cons of the economic model design of the public chain for the time being, and the performance of market tokens. Combined with the open source developer data panel provided by Electric Capital, we will select some interesting public chains other than Ethereum. or iconic innovative technologies for further research.
Polkadot - Substrate
Polkadot uses blockchain parallelization technology to introduce the concepts of relay chains and parallel chains, and realizes the shared security and interoperable communication of multiple blockchains through the cross-chain communication protocol XCMP. The technical framework that supports these functional features of Polkadot is Substrate. Substrate provides the smallest development unit, Pallets, which abstracts various functional modules, such as assets, pledges, and EVM. Based on Pallets, it provides a development framework Frame and a customizable runtime for the blockchain. Combining a unique asynchronous model and parachain sharding mechanism, Substrate provides the ability to process a large number of transactions simultaneously, improving the throughput and performance of the overall network. In addition, Substrate also supports a plug-in consensus mechanism. Developers can choose different consensus algorithms according to their needs. In addition, Substrate has built-in Ethereum EVM and WASM runtime, which also facilitates application migration and development in the Ethereum ecosystem. Finally, Substrate supports on-chain hot upgrades, which can upgrade and update the blockchain without interrupting the network.
Cosmos - Tendermint / Sovereign Chain / App Chain /IBC
Tendermint is the first PoS consensus algorithm to achieve Byzantine fault tolerance, and is also one of the sources of inspiration for Ethereums PoS algorithm. The concept of Sovereign Chain and App Chain perfectly embodies the Cosmos decentralized multi-chain concept, which not only allows each sovereign chain to have its own consensus mechanism, economic model and governance rules, but also allows specific applications or services to directly pass through the Cosmos network Build a small application chain. The two can communicate and interact with each other using IBC to build a multi-chain Internet advocated by Cosmos as a whole.
Cosmos has two core development kits: the consensus engine CometBFT (the successor to Tendermint Core upgrade) that implements the Tendermint consensus algorithm and defines the application chain interface ABCI, and the Comos SDK that supports IBC and CosmWasm. The corresponding ecological aspect is the Cosmos Hub, the center of the Cosmos network, and the various Zones connected to the Cosmos Hub.Since the launch of the Cosmos mainnet in 2019, IBC has gone from supporting the initial Zones interconnection, Zones and Hub interconnection to richer and more complete functions such as inter-chain accounts (ICA) and inter-chain security (ICS). Taking September 2022 as a key turning point, we will officially transition from the first stage of initiation (Initiation) to the second stage of integration (Integration).
Sei Network - Optimized for Trading
As a popular Cosmos ecological application chain recently launched, Sei has a built-in order matching engine, sub-second settlement speed, parallel processing of orders, single-block order execution and other features. All these customized functions of Sei are completed at the base layer, mainly through ABCI++ to achieve some of their optimizations. ABCI++ is the upcoming upgrade of Cosmos ABCI, which can make every step of the consensus programmable.
Solana - Proof of History
Proof of History (PoH) is an innovative time proof technology, which can be understood as a global clock implementation mechanism in a distributed system, used to coordinate operations and time sequences among distributed system nodes. By embedding timestamps in each block, PoH builds a globally shared time series in the Solana network, allowing nodes in the network to easily verify the order and time of transactions. In this way, it can not only improve the throughput and performance of the entire network, but also effectively prevent malicious tampering and replay attacks.
NEAR - Nightshade Sharding / Beacon chain
Originating from the early sharding idea of Ethereum, it also inherits the concept of Beacon chain, but also optimizes the block producers and verifiers of each shard. Each shard has a group of block producers responsible for generating blocks and packaging the transactions and status data in the blocks. Since each shard is relatively independent, each block producer only needs to pay attention to the shard to which he belongs, and can generate blocks independently without coordinating with block producers of other shards. Validators also only need to verify the transactions and states belonging to their own shards, without paying attention to the state of the entire network. This improves the efficiency of block generation and verification, allowing more transactions and status updates to be processed.
Avalanche - Avalanche Consensus
The Avalanche Protocol introduces an avalanche effect voting mechanism that enables nodes to quickly reach consensus and form a consistent decision sequence throughout the network. The key to the protocol lies in the process of multiple rounds of voting and iterative decision-making. Through continuous voting and feedback, the nodes in the network gradually converge to a consistent consensus result. Since nodes can vote and make decisions in parallel, the parallel processing capability of the entire system is improved, and the avalanche protocol also allows the dynamic entry and exit of nodes and the adaptive adjustment of voting rules and parameters, thereby achieving flexible scalability.
Flow - multi-node architecture
Pipelined multi-node architecture. The execution node is responsible for the execution of transactions and achieves massive processing and calculation operations of transactions. The verification node monitors and verifies the calculation results of the execution node, ensures that the execution node correctly executes the smart contract in accordance with the rules, and verifies the accuracy and consistency of the calculation. The consensus node is responsible for the ordering of transactions and the generation of blocks, and its task is to ensure the security of the network. Such a multi-node architecture has to be lamented, as if the execution layer, data availability layer, settlement layer, and consensus layer advocated by the current modular blockchain are directly implemented at the public chain level.
Monad - asynchronous concurrent transactions
Monads are EVM compatible L1 and transactions are also EVM equivalent. In order to improve TPS, Monad will identify and identify transactions that do not affect each other, thereby eliminating the common dependencies of these transactions, and then achieve high concurrent transaction performance through an asynchronous execution mechanism.
Diem/Libra - Move
Facebook/Metas Diem (formerly known as Libra) has attracted worldwide attention since its inception. Whether it is due to criticism from traditional regulators or doubts from the native Web3 world, Diems original intention is to serve the global digital world. One billion people can fully enjoy financial services comparable to traditional bank account payment systems. To this end, Diem has designed high-performance verification nodes in terms of technology, as well as the Move language and the corresponding Move virtual machine that take into account asset security and smart contract execution efficiency. However, due to regulatory and policy reasons, Diem failed to launch the main network as scheduled. Then, after inheriting these technical accumulations, the Diem team derived three public chain projects with different exploration routes. Mentioned Sui Network, Aptos and Linera.
Sui Network - Causal Order / Object Model
For transactions, a DAG-like processing method is adopted, combined with a unique object model and a snapshot-like version number management mechanism, so that transactions no longer need to be arranged in a complete order, but only need to be arranged in a causal order, which can naturally be obtained Massive parallel execution capabilities. Of course, the technical support behind this also comes from the optimization and adjustment made by Sui in the object system of the Move language, and the addition of many asset attributes related to Web3.
Aptos - Block-STM
The parallel execution engine of Block-STM is like the Rollup of optimistic fraud proof, which directly introduces the optimistic lock concurrency control mechanism in the first layer of public chain. Of course, the technology of optimistic locking has been widely used in traditional databases. However, because optimistic locking is prone to high conflict rate and retry rate in scenarios with frequent write operations, it is not as suitable as pessimistic locking for scenarios with high concurrency . Here, Aptos also optimizes this through solutions such as preprocessing and transaction splitting.
Linera - Microchains
If Sui Network and Aptos have made good use of Diems Move language features, then Linera has well inherited Diems consensus mechanism. Even going back to the source, Lineras technical architecture comes from Facebooks original FastPay project, and FastPay is more like the predecessor of Diem/Libra, providing specific design concepts and in-depth solutions for fast, secure and low-latency large-scale payment scenarios technical details.
Linera has done a lot of research on architecture scalability as a whole, mainly through Microchains. Microchains are maintained by the client, forming a Multi-chain network. Microchains can be publicized or privatized. Communication across Microchains uses asynchronous messages. The entire network uses the same set of validators and DPoS consensus guarantee and execution. Validator nodes are responsible for message delivery and state synchronization. In addition, the validator nodes are also responsible for the operation and maintenance of public Microchains.
To some extent, Lineras technical architecture and concept are similar to the current popular cloud-native design. Microchain corresponds to many mirrored containers, and App corresponds to mirrored instances. Such an architecture, like cloud native infrastructure, has good performance in terms of elasticity and fault tolerance. Of course, how to safely and efficiently solve the communication and synchronization between Microchains is a different core issue that Linera needs to face and solve as a public chain.
Just as the cloud-native architecture has gradually occupied the selection of traditional application architectures through its own advantages in the past ten years or so. This phenomenon of catching up from behind and even overtaking makes us believe that our investment in Linera is our firm expectation that Linera, based on Diem/Fastpays mature solutions and unique innovative technology, will one day be able to surpass it in certain application scenarios in the future. Ethereum.
Conclusion
I don’t know if it’s an illusion, but after reviewing the innovative technologies of these public chains again, I feel that the Rollup As A Service framework that is popular in Ethereum Layer 2 is so similar to Cosmos’ SDK and Polkadot’s Substrate (Optimism’s OP Stack, Arbitrums Orbit, Polygons zkSupernet, Starknets Appchains, and zkSyncs Hyperchains), and even some ideas of the new narrative Restaking are somewhat similar to Polkadots pledged DOT for slot auctions and Cosmos 2.0s ICS. The rise of Layer 2 is closely related to the strength of Ethereum. However, the exploration of the new public chain is as important as Layer 2, or even surpasses. The innovation and breakthrough of the new public chain in technology and solution exploration will greatly improve the foundation of the entire Web3 industry. Service capacity upper limit.
When the past public chains have accumulated more mature experience for the entire industry, the public chain track is more likely to produce a more powerful new public chain in the exploration of innovative public chains. Just as Satoshi Nakamoto could use the proof-of-work mechanism and UTXO model, combined with public-private key cryptography, P2P network and chain block technology to creatively propose the decentralized blockchain network of Bitcoin, now and in the future, We have reason to believe that, based on the innovative technology of the above-mentioned new husband chain, in the Web3 world, there will inevitably be a public chain that combines the strengths of hundreds of schools and realizes the heavy responsibility of Mass Adoption. We can see that, especially the innovative public chains of the Cosmos system (such as Sei Network) and the Diem system/Move language system (such as Linera) will continue to explore the possibility of blockchain in different latitudes and challenge the Ethereum The status of the workshop, to extend the ceiling of the public chain!
Reference
https://developer.bitcoin.org/reference/
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/
https://polkadot.network/development/docs/
https://docs.substrate.io/
https://docs.cosmos.network/main
https://ibc.cosmos.network/
https://cosmos.network/cometbft/
https://docs.sei.io/
https://docs.solana.com/
https://docs.near.org/
https://docs.avax.network/
https://developers.flow.com/
https://monadlabs.substack.com/
https://developers.diem.com/docs/welcome-to-diem/
https://aptos.dev/
https://docs.sui.io/
https://linera.io/developers
