Co-authors
Peter Yoon (@whitebitcoin8)
Andrew Kang (@adr_sk_)
This article is Episode 2 of Why Gno?, a series featuring a deep dive into Gno.land, the most performant smart contract platform powered by Gnolang, and Gnoswap, an innovative concentrated liquidity DEX aspiring to become the liquidity hub of Gno.land.
[Why Gno?]
Episode 1: Tracing the History of Crypto
Episode 2: Hello World, Meet Gno.land
TL;DR:
- The unique token economy of Gno.land splits the governance and consensus layer from its utility layer, benchmarking the sustainable economics of Bitcoin.
- Gnolang and Tendermint2 scale the performance and simplicity of smart contracts, creating the most attractive environment for web2 developers to onboard.
- The founder, Jae Kwon, is capable of delivering the promised blockchain, proven by his creation of Cosmos, the most powerful stack for building and connecting blockchains in all of web3.
Intro
Gno.land is a novel layer 1 blockchain, first introduced to the world in February of 2021, with a vision to “bring next-generation smart contract programming” to the Cosmos ecosystem and beyond.
The goal of Gno.land is to challenge Ethereum’s dominance as the de facto smart contract platform by offering a robust token economy and a seamless developer onboarding experience with a streamlined suite of systems including Proof of Contribution and Gnolang, and push past the frontier to position as a Hub that offers the best-in-class smart contracts for an ecosystem of blockchains with unmatched performance powered by the GnoVM and Tendermint2.
This article has been designed to serve as a gentle introduction to the vision and the design philosophy of the core components behind this intricate system.
Hello world, meet Gno.land.
A Durable Token Economy To Reward Builders, Not Capitalists
The common challenge of all blockchains is “achieving trust in a trustless environment”. As explored in our previous article, Bitcoin’s approach was Proof of Work (PoW), trusting the entity who puts in the most amount of “work” into validating the network, while Ethereum’s approach was Proof of Stake (PoS), trusting the entity who “stakes” the most amount of capital as a security bond into validating the network.
Although PoW systems have enabled a deflationary token economy, which created a scarce and sustainable monetary system like Gold, the complex computation race included in their consensus has left them slow, unscalable, and environmentally harmful.
On the other hand, PoS systems have achieved lower energy consumption and faster consensus by simply comparing the amount of capital bonded between validators. However, the trade-off was to force a highly-inflationary monetary system to maintain a minimum staking percentage for the security of the underlying network.
Gno.land achieves the best of both worlds — sustainability and scalability — by introducing a new consensus mechanism: Proof of Contribution (PoC). PoC is a system where the validators and governors of the chain are selected based on their verifiable, transparent contributions to the project.
The contributions are measured in quantifiable, non-tradable scores called $GSHAREs (or ^worx — details to be defined) by the Evaluation DAO, an organization accountable for fairly reviewing and rewarding submitted contributions.
Owners of $GSHAREs, called Contributors, are split into multiple tiers based on their contributions, with each tier given different rules and voting powers for matters ranging from simple chain configurations to validator selections.
Contributors also earn a portion of transaction fees of Gno.land, which essentially positions $GSHAREs as the “mining facility” found in PoW systems, allowing the network to reward the participants without inflation. However, a vital difference exists in the untradable nature of $GSHAREs, preventing an entity from “buying in their spot” to the PoC. This design leaves the PoC consensus highly resistant to financial and Sybil attacks, and further emphasizes the principles and fundamentals of Gno.land over financial gains.
The utility token of Gno.land is $GNOT, a transferable fee token. $GNOT has a fixed supply of 1 billion without any minting mechanisms, ensuring its deflationary nature. The sole purpose of $GNOT is to fuel all transactions on the Gno.land blockchain — no governance, no staking, and no inflation — resembling the design of Gold and Bitcoin. Thanks to this structure, the DeFi ecosystem will likely thrive on Gno.land, as it is reasonable to assume that a majority of $GNOTs will be utilized in DeFi protocols for capital efficiency, as they’re safe from dilutions, unlike PoS systems.
In a nutshell, PoC is a system that 1) rewards expertise and collaboration over capital to minimize the risk of financial attacks, 2) scales the consensus with a quantifiable contribution scoring scheme powered by $GSHARE, and 3) achieves a robust, sustainable token economy built to synergize with DeFi, based on a deflationary monetary policy of $GNOT.
Smart Contracts on Steroids
Ethereum has pioneered the era of decentralized applications built with smart contracts — the first time in human history that anyone could reliably use complex financial products on the internet without trusting an intermediary.
The increasing demand for trustless, autonomous digital finance has rapidly filled up the limited block spaces of Ethereum, causing transaction fees to reach unaffordable levels for retail. To make matters worse, the inability to view the actual code behind the smart contracts has left daring wallets interacting with new protocols vulnerable, resulting in billions of dollars completely drained.
The need for a performant and transparent smart contract platform is clear, and Gno.land proposes a viable solution to this challenge.
Gno.land achieves performance with Tendermint2 (TM2), a new iteration of the popular Tendermint Core. Tendermint Core is a powerful consensus engine for blockchains with the capability of handling up to 4,000 transactions per second (tps) with instant finality (a term for an immutable state of a transaction), as opposed to the lackluster 15 tps and 15-minute-finality of Ethereum.
Today, Tendermint Core powers the most vibrant blockchain ecosystems in the industry such as the BNB Chain, the Cosmos Hub, Injective, and Osmosis which together make up a combined market cap of $48b+.
TM2 is based on the v0.34 of Tendermint Core, the version that was longest running on the Cosmos Hub, proven and battle-tested for its stability and safety. The design philosophy of TM2 is to create “complete software” without any vulnerabilities with development focused on minimalism, dependency removal, and modularity.
TM2 is software still under active development. For curious readers, further proposals and the roadmap of TM2 can be found in its dedicated Github Repository.
On the programming side, smart contracts on Gno.land are powered by Gnolang, by far the most developer-friendly blockchain-specific language. Gnolang is 99% identical to Golang, a universally popular programming language developed by Google with simplicity, type safety, and clarity in mind.
Unlike other blockchain ecosystems that force new developers to put time and effort into mastering their own languages (e.g. Solidity for Ethereum and Move for Aptos), Gno.land allows web2 developers to start writing smart contracts in minutes, which drastically lowers the barrier to entry. The visuals below show the vast differences between the developer pool of Solidity and Golang.
Furthermore, the source code of all smart contracts published to the Gno.land blockchain are uploaded in their raw, human-readable form, as opposed to other any chains where only the bytecode (a compiled, machine-readable form of the code) can be found on-chain. This means that all code is open source and anyone can verify the contracts they’re interacting with on Gno.land — the highest degree of transparency that can be found in no other blockchains.
For developers out there, stay tuned, as our following article will feature a deeper dive into the technical side of the chain. What’s covered in this article is merely the tip of the iceberg.
Built by the Creator of the Cosmos Ecosystem
The company behind the Gno.land project is All in Bits (AIB), who has made invaluable contributions to the Cosmos Ecosystem with the Cosmos-SDK, the IBC Protocol, and the Tendermint Core, and has launched the Ignite CLI, a powerful developer tool trusted to launch 15+ sovereign blockchains.
Over the years, AIB has displayed its expertise in the interchain ecosystem and competence in optimizing developer experience, under the leadership of Jae Kwon, the inventor of Tendermint and Cosmos himself.
Designing and building such an intricate system undoubtedly involves a lot of work to be done. Rest assured, the organization behind Gno.land is a focused, dedicated team with a proven track record, certainly capable of delivering the promised blockchain.
Join the Frontier
If you resonate with the vision of Gno.land, now is your chance to become a part of this ambitious journey. Whether you’re a developer, researcher, or community leader, there’s a spot for you on Gno.land. Help us build the future home for thousands of secure & performant smart contracts, get rewarded for your valuable contributions, and become a co-owner of the chain that will last for the next generations to come.
To embark on your journey, visit the official website at gno.land where you can discover insightful blogs, the on-going grants program, and Game of Realms, a high stakes online hackathon for all builders of Gno.land.
