Introducing Gear Protocol

Today Polkadot is one of the fastest growing multi-chain networks. Although it has an adaptive architecture for building smart-contract platforms and rapid technology development for decentralized applications, it is not a smart contract platform by itself.

Gear Protocol is creating a technology that could be deployed as a Polkadot parachain which will be a tool for hosting smart contracts. Like Polkadot, Gear uses a Substrate framework.This simplifies the creation of different blockchains for specific applications. Substrate provides extensive functionality out-of-the-box and allows one to focus on creating a custom engine on top of the protocol.

Launching a blockchain has previously been expensive, but Gear could allow dApp developers to focus on their projects rather than building and operating an entire blockchain from scratch.

The central aspect of Polkadot is its ability to route arbitrary messages between chains. Both Polkadot and Gear networks speak the same language — asynchronous messages — so all the projects built using Gear could easily integrate into the Polkadot and Kusama networks.

Gear’s key features

The main engine of the Gear Protocol is a smart contract module. In Gear’s case, any smart contract is a WebAssembly program compiled in different languages, such as Rust, C, C++, etc. It has a low entry barrier for developers from outside the crypto world because they can build smart contracts in a familiar environment. It is easier for developers to experiment with smart-contract programming languages.

Gear’s smart contract architecture uses the actor model under the hood and provides:

• Persistent memory for immutable programs
• Asynchronous message handling
• A minimal, intuitive, and sufficient API surface for blockchain context

The Actor model of communication between on-chain components offers much higher composability, better compatibility with parallel code execution, and sharding.

Each program has a fixed amount of memory, and Gear allows to control it. The program can read and write only within its memory and does not have access to the memory space of other programs. Separate isolated memory space for each program allows parallel processing of messages on the Gear node.

About our team

Gear’s team has vast experience in the blockchain space. Gear’s founder was directly involved in creating Polkadot and Substrate technologies.

Founder and CEO

Nikolay Volf has been one of the key developers of basic Polkadot technology and Substrate since 2015. As an initial member of the Parity Technologies team, Nikolay worked on multiple protocols in the blockchain space: Ethereum, Bitcoin, ZCash. Nikolay also led the first-ever implementation of WebAssembly smart contracts while working for Parity Technologies. When Polkadot became a functional live network, his broad experience and knowledge of blockchain allowed him to create a unique project like Gear. Nikolay has built a team of professionals passionate about blockchain and with vast experience programming in Rust.

Founder and CFO

Ilya Veller has 20+ years of experience working with HNWI and global hedge funds at Renaissance Capital, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America. Ilya raised over $1bln for various projects over the last 20 years.

Founder and Head of Development

Alexander Bugorkov has extensive experience working with successful technology companies like Lyft, New Relic and Spotify.

CTO

Petr Volynskiy has broad experience in product development, product management, and technical leadership in multiple areas, including business applications development for project and business process management, system architecture, cross platform development environment & processes, web & mobile apps, operating systems, virtualization and Cloud (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS). At his time, he raised a team of professionals who became part of the core team of Polkadot and other networks.

Gear is a highly specialized project. All the attention and dedication of the core team are entirely focused on developing the project in the most efficient way to accomplish the goal.

Why it can be Polkadot?

Gear’s infrastructure for out-of-the-box dApp creation could allow any developer to build blockchain applications in just two clicks, which on other platforms takes much longer. We could improve the Polkadot ecosystem, adjust to its needs, and move the dApp market forward.

Check out Gear’s GitHub and stay up to date.