0Chain MainNet Update — Part I
Hello 0Chainers! I’m excited to give you an update on what we have been working on. I apologize for not able to give a regular update, as most of my days have been stretched long, and I wanted to provide more context than a 140 character tweet.
When MainNet
Lets get the big question out of the way. Wen mainnet? as some community members would ask.
First, I’d like to put things in perspective and look at how long other large credible projects have taken. Filecoin has taken about 8 years. Sia about 7 years. Dfinity 5 years.
So development of massive projects take time, regardless of initial estimates, as there are 1000 things that can go wrong and usually does — including funding, developers, market, features, architecture, protocols, test processes, etc.
Compared to their timeline, we started in 2018, and we have built a fast blockchain, a high performance storage platform, a full-blown app, 0Box, an enterprise app, 0Lake, and tools to make use of our platform — all from scratch. If you don’t believe us, take a look at our GitHub.
Is there a need to rush to go to mainnet? Yes. We are constantly trying to speed up development on all fronts, and I’ll provide some details in a later blog, but…there are some things that take time for distributed systems, and hard to test out corner cases until you actually do it in a real setting, which is something we’ve been doing in the last month and discovering new bugs.
There are key items that we need to cover before mainnet. One is to get the view change working to on-board all the miners and sharders for our genesis block. We solved several protocol issues during this period, and our fellow miners have been very accommodating and helpful with logs and coordinating the bring up, and we are working on a final fix (we hope!) to get over the current bug.
The overall estimate to get Fuji out would be between 1–3 months from today, depending on where we are in the blockchain readiness. On the flip side, we are progressing well on some of the key features that will impact our NFT customers, who I believe to be the key initial drivers of our storage, and I’m very excited about them. And “wen mainnet” will then become an insignificant milestone and dot of our incipient history making platform. The point is even if we get all the blockchain issues sorted out, we want to make sure we have the platform ready for NFT customers to jump on and use from Day 1. We want to be the ideal NFT storage platform. We need to have a great product market fit to enable exponential consumption.
The NFT Marketplace
While I believe our platform is ideal for personal storage, and for startups that can leverage censor-free storage, and for enterprises that can achieve GDPR compliance with ease, and for MSPs that can leverage our storage for higher profits, the adoption curve for each of these markets may not be as fast as the NFT, and our platform is a perfect fit for it. Here is why.
NFT Permanency
The problem facing most NFT curators and artists is how to convince the buyer of the NFT that the data asset has permanency, especially as they increase in value. The curator and seller need to convince the buyer that the artwork even if the curator were to cease their business the data would not be lost. Currently the curator uses IPFS to hand-wave such an argument, and spin up their own node to guarantee it and so a buyer would then need to replicate it on their own node after purchase if they want additional insurance. But this is cumbersome, and a better solution can be provided by our platform, removing any liability worries of the curator.
We’re introducing the concept of a multi-payer pool, which allows anyone to pay for the storage of the NFT. It may begin with free storage tokens that our network can provide, and the initial artist or curator putting in some tokens, but can always be sustained by the new buyer or curator as needed. This is a flexible and a permanent solution for data storage and removes liability for the curator. They can simply tell the buyer that they have a copy of the NFT on 0Chain as insurance, and the buyer has total control of it, and will atomically transfer when the purchase is made.
NFT Display
The artist typically uploads data ranging from 10MB to 1GB depending on the resolution of the art, and the platform then has to sort out how to display it in a format for the web, mobile, and desktop, and have a good quality CDN to attract buyers. While this may be okay for some artwork, all of these quickly become a scaling problem for the curator. It is therefore desirable to have multiple files for the NFT with different resolutions that the artist can upload, to make it easy for the curator to display it and appease to artists who like higher quality resolution for mobile, desktop, and web platforms.
We’re introducing the concept of a NFT that can be a hash of a collection of files, if immutable, and have them stored on a 0Chain allocation as a shadow NFT token.
Mutable NFTs
Some artists want a livestream event to be a NFT. In this scenario, the NFT cannot be the hash of the content as its continuously changing. Another example of a mutable NFT is if the seller would allow re-mix or derivative works of their art, so that the buyer would extract more value with their derivative work, and enhance the value of the NFT.
So we are introducing the concept of a mutable NFT which would be based on the allocation ID on our platform. For live-streamed NFT, the data would be stored and displayed simultaneously as it is live-streamed to viewers, but would also be recorded as a NFT that the owner can sell later.
Private NFTs
There are instances where the curator desires to provide private showings (drops) to their exclusive members and enable them to purchase NFTs only on their platform. Unfortunately, in the current scheme, the same NFT could be sold at multiple platforms and the curator does not have much control over it, and may lose their marketplace commission.
So we are introducing the concept of private NFTs where the asset transfer takes place with the approval of the curator and the encryption keys are changed over from the owner to the buyer as part of an atomic transfer of data assets with the sale.
More details on all of this will come at a later time as we work with our partners, and publish a formal protocol.
The key point is there is a lot of excitement on the consumption side, which will drive all aspects of our ecosystem.
In the upcoming blogs, I’ll provide more details on the tools that we’re working on to leverage usage including using Ethereum wallet to auto-generate 0chain wallet and allocation and provide a seamless experience for NFTs and data marketplaces such as Ocean. I’ll also detail how development is going with Magma and how this project could turn out to be the best way to scale transactions and usage beyond storage. In the next blog, I’ll talk about our current development status on the Explorer, 0Wallet, and 0Box, and how we plan to open up the repositories to enable other developers to leverage our code to build different apps, even if they end up competing with our offering.
