Development Update January 2022

After the launch of the first Baseledger Testnet “Lakewood” in September, and updates on the Baseledger development documentation in December, a new Baseledger testnet “Plateau” has been developed and published. It represents the candidate for the launch of Baseledger Mainnet, planned for Q1 2022.

This blog post explains the main features of Baseledger Plateau and gives some insights on the development background.

The Baseledger Plateau code mentioned in the following updates is available on the Baseledger Github. It is still work in progress, and the corresponding documentation will be updated at docs.baseledger.net

Inclusion of Lakewood Concepts

All concepts from the Lakewood Testnet, (like the transaction types for proof storing, the internal use of transaction balances, the validation power procedure, the cosmos module architecture and more) have been included in the Plateau testnet. (The Baseledger Peachtree Testnet has been archived and is not proceeded further).

Gnosis Safe Multi-Sig Governance solution

Gnosis Safe is the most trusted platform to manage digital assets on Ethereum. The Baseledger development team set up a multi-signature contract wallet, representing the council members. This wallet is used to update the Baseledger smart contract on Ethereum (see below) by receiving a majority of signatures of the Baseledger Governance Council members. Striving for further decentralization and automation, this solution may be updated / replaced by a different smart contract based architecture in the future.

Baseledger Smart Contract on Ethereum

Together with the team of Limechain, the Baseledger developers are developing a smart contract for UBT handling around Baseledger. The smart contract is using concepts from “Payment Splitter”, one of OpenZeppelin’s primitives for financial systems and includes:

• Functions to send UBT to the smart contract and specifying a desired Baseledger node address that should receive a corresponding Baseledger Worktoken balance inside Baseledger. This function will be used by clients who want to use Baseledger to store proofs. To do so, they need a Baseledger internal transaction balance which will be used by transactions and has to be filled up by UBT. This includes a price oracle to reflect the current UBT <> EUR price in the conversion of UBT to Baseledger Worktokens.
• Maps to hold and represent the current validation power structure, including the addresses representing the stake, the addresses used for revenue shares, the current shares of the overall validation power, and the allocated UBT, which had been accumulated by clients sending UBT to the contract to receive transaction balance on Baseledger.
• Functions to update the map with new validators and new share distribution of the overall validation power. These functions are only callable by the owner of the smart contract, which currently is a multi-signature configuration based on Gnosis Safe (see above), awaiting the majority of Council member signatures to perform.
• Functions to withdraw the allocated amount of UBT per validator, which had been accumulated by clients sending UBT to the contract to receive transaction balance on Baseledger. These functions can only be called by the whitelisted validators in the map, and every validator can only withdraw his/her specifically allocated amount of UBT.
• The functions include the writing of Ethereum Event Logs, which are used as events to notify Baseledger of changes happening in Ethereum.

The smart contract has been designed in a way to be secure and performant and is currently audited by multiple companies. The audit results will also be available in the GitHub repository.

Ethereum Cosmos Bridge

To properly reflect changes and events on the Ethereum side, the Baseledger Developers developed an Ethereum to Cosmos bridge inspired by concepts from the Cosmos Gravity Bridge, and including the orchestration and “oracle-izing” of Ethereum events inside Baseledger.

On a high level, this architecture proceeds the following steps:

1. Writing an event log on Ethereum
2. The Baseledger orchestrator picking up that event
3. The Baseledger orchestrator (each validator node does this) proposes / attestates a claim of an Ethereum event to be mirrored in Baseledger.
4. A dedicated Baseledger module picking up that claim and finding consensus over the correct happening of the event. This happens on all validator nodes and thus represents an Oracle-like solution where each validator proofs an outside event before providing consensus.
5. Validators submit claims, attestation holds votes, and after each block every not processed attestation is checked to see if >66% validators voted (and thereby submitted the claim)

Baseledger > Ethereum anchoring

The Baseledger Developers are currently working on functions and methods in the service layer of each Baseledger node to pull a range of Baseledger blocks or transactions, summarize them in a merkle tree, and calculate the root of that tree. This root and the referenced blocks/transactions can then be stored on Ethereum to anchor the Baseledger transactions (acting as an L2 in this setup) on L1 Ethereum. The decision which subset of transactions are part of the anchoring can be made by the user. It can be generic anchors of a specific block range (“anchoring every n Baseledger blocks on Ethereum”) or specific anchors (“anchoring all transactions that belong to a specific workflow”).

Baseledger Upgrade mechanisms

Following the migration documentation on Cosmos, the Baseledger development ensured the ability of Baseledger Plateau to be updated with new features during the productive operation. This documentation will be readily available in the GitHub repo for anyone running a validator node.

Community driven updates

The complete Baseledger ecosystem is happy, that there has been community effort to improve the Baseledger solution. In this spirit, the Baseledger Explorer received some updates in regards to better display of transaction details and in ensuring compatibility of the Big Dipper code (on which the Baseledger Explorer is based) with the latest Cosmos updates.

Adjacent components from enterprise companies

In addition the the Baseledger development, many teams in the Baseledger Ecosystem picked up tasks to develop adjacent components, that help adoption and integration of Baseledger in enterprise environments:

• Concircle & Unibright: conUBC. Concircle and Unibright developed conUBC, a SAP certified blockchain connector based on the Unibright Connector. conUBC includes native Baseledger connectivity out-of-the-box.
• Unibright, Concircle, Finspot, Lakewood Consulting: Baseledger Proxy. Unibright, Concircle, Finspot and Lakewood Consulting developed a proxy for enterprise clients that includes all components to set up a Baseline compliant process, like workgroup setup, off-chain messaging, multi-party-approval workflow management and Baseledger connection.
• SPO Consulting: Fiat Gateway for Transaction Balance on Baseledger. SPO Consulting is developing a fiat gateway, where clients can pay in fiat and the corresponding UBT are automatically taken from a SPO UBT pool and sent to the Baseledger smart contract.
• Unibright Benelux and SPO Consulting: Proxy-Staking Pools on Gysr. Unibright Benelux and SPO Consulting are developing and setting up pools on Gysr.io that can be used for proxy-stakers to participate in the ecosystem without being a validator themselves. Gysr includes a smart contract based solutions for deposits and rewards and a comfortable web3 frontend. Pools can be established on Ethereum Mainnet and Polygon.
• Unibright and SPO Consulting: Ethereum Anchoring. Unibright and SPO Consulting co-host a public available service that anchors all blocks (accumulated per 24 hours) on Ethereum

Further updates that have been agreed and approved for publication by the Baseledger Governance Council will be published here.

Baseledger is a public network designed for storing and managing baseline proofs, which are an essential part of synchronizing systems of record across the internet in accordance with the Baseline Protocol. The high-performance, high-availability network provides verified systems integration services at very low cost, without requiring companies to spend time and capital setting it up.

Baseledger complies with the Baseline Protocol to ensure that no data is moved from companies’ systems of record onto any kind of blockchain, and proofs cannot be used by an observer to learn anything about companies’ confidential information, relationships or business activities.

Initially established by Unibright, and joined by Concircle, Consensys Mesh, Finspot and others later, Baseledger is officially council governed since December 2021.