At present, a large number of public chain projects are developing for the infrastructure of the blockchain. Similar projects include EOS, Dfinity, TrustNote , Achain , IFMChain , Ontology , which focus on public chain development ; there are also public chains for specific industries, such as CyberMiles in the e-commerce industry , IPTChain and ENT in the entertainment industry; DAPPs that focus on developing cross-chain The development platforms include ArcBlock and Hero Node . Similar projects have lowered the threshold for developing DAPPs; there is also NULS , which modularizes the public chain , hoping to make it easier for developers to customize their own public chain.
However, the performance, stability and resource consumption of the underlying public chain are inescapable problems of the public chain. Each public chain has different solutions. TrustNote wants to solve it by using a new data structure such as directed acyclic graph, and IFMChain tries to solve it. It can be solved by changing the block-making mechanism, Achain wants to solve it through a multi-chain parallel approach, and Ultrain wants to innovate the consensus mechanism. The initial chain TrueChain to be introduced in this article also adopts a different consensus mechanism from most public chains, called a hybrid consensus mechanism.
According to Zhang Jiannan, CTO of ChuChain, in the fields of digital advertising and other fields, there is a demand for blockchain commercial applications, but the infrastructure is not yet perfect. Applications in many industries need an underlying public chain that provides infrastructure for business, so the team began to develop a general-purpose blockchain. type public chain.
The Chuchain team believes that in the field of mainstream consensus design, PoW consensus can achieve large-scale decentralization, and the number of nodes has recognized scalability (Scalability), but there are obvious bottlenecks in performance. Although Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols represented by PBFT can have high performance under certain conditions, they are usually designed to be used in private situations, that is, all nodes need to know each other's identities (public keys, etc.) before the protocol starts, and Nodes cannot freely enter and exit the network.
At present, the main problem of the industry is to solve the contradiction between performance and security/decentralization. The solution adopted by the initial chain is to use a hybrid consensus mechanism to combine the advantages of both.
Roughly speaking, PFBT is used to quickly update the ledger; PoW is used to verify transactions and assist PBFT member changes. Transactions entering the initial chain network generally enter two layers at the same time: the first layer is the PBFT consensus layer that is written into the ledger, which is expected to have dozens of nodes and has a fast update speed; the other layer is more like the supervision layer, using the PoW consensus mechanism, Responsible for verifying transactions, nodes can join or withdraw freely, and compete for transaction verification rights by contributing computing power. Even when the security assumption of PBFT itself fails (for example, more than a certain number of member nodes are manipulated by attackers), it can be recovered through the PoW chain.
Zhang Jiannan explained that PBFT ensures the speed of the ledger, while PoW ensures the openness and security of the network. This balances the conflict between performance and security. PBFT obtains the qualification to enter the PBFT consensus layer by contributing the network resources of the server. Once the supervisory layer finds that there is a transaction inconsistency, it can use the PoW chain to restart the PBFT and punish it by retrospectively finding the "bad nodes" in the PBFT, such as exempting them from qualifications and deducting rewards.
ChuChain believes that Hybrid Consensus is currently one of the most promising designs that meet both performance requirements and public chain requirements. Since it was put forward, it has a relatively solid theoretical foundation in academia, and it has relatively strong practicability at the same time. In addition, and more importantly, the security assumptions and protocol properties of hybrid consensus have clear mathematical definitions, which are more stable and controllable than many other more radical schemes.
Just like the three mainstream consensus mechanisms of PoW, PoS and PBFT, they have all undergone rigorous mathematical calculations and academic demonstrations, and have clear security boundaries. The "security boundary" here means that users can clearly know under what circumstances the public chain is safe and what attacks can be successful.
In terms of ecological construction, nodes mainly rely on institutions with more server resources such as enterprises, and the most important thing for ecology is that there are enough DAPP partners on the chain. The first chain has several partners, including European advertising company Joors and other domestic and foreign digital advertising companies, Flash Chain (mutual aid guarantee), and several domestic game and advertising companies.
The initial chain has already deployed a network of 3 nodes in March and started some contract design and testing. The test network containing only PBFT will be launched in April, and a complete hybrid consensus protocol will be deployed in the future. It is expected that the network can be implemented and tested Seamless,. Zhang Jiannan said that in terms of consensus, the team will focus on solving several problems:
1. Improve and optimize the existing consensus algorithm;
2. Network requests and data exchange to ensure security while interacting outside the chain;
3. Hybrid consensus node incentive problem;
4. Research a reliable and reliable sharding strategy to further improve the throughput performance of the protocol;
5. For better privacy protection, the first chain will explore the zero-knowledge proof in the future.
The first chain has completed the cornerstone round of financing. The team is close to 20 people, divided into research team, engineering team and product team. The research team is mainly responsible for designing the consensus mechanism, the engineering team is responsible for improving the infrastructure, and the product team is mainly designing products for C-end users. Zhang Jiannan introduced that the current related products of the first chain include, the above-mentioned first chain test network Fabricated TrueChain, the first chain mixed consensus TRUE Consensus, the full node TRUE Node, the light wallet TRUE Wallet, the blockchain browser TrueScan, enterprise customers-oriented Steller, a management tool for the entire life cycle of contracts.
According to the white paper, Cheng Xiaoyong, the founder of Chuchain, is a serial entrepreneur, and Lin Daliang was responsible for the operation of “Baidu Baike”. CTO Zhang Jiannan is the founder of TopHacker Group. The initial chain research and engineering team comes from research institutions such as Tsinghua University and Oxford University, as well as companies such as Red Hat, Alibaba and Google . Principal and Global Legal and GR James Cooper of ChuChain USA is a professor of law at West California Law School.
I am Lu Xiaoming, the author of 36氪. I pay attention to finance, blockchain and tourism. For projects seeking reports or exchanges, please add WeChat lohiuming. Please note your name, unit, title and reason.