“Better than Coinbase” — IOTAs new Assembly network is the missing piece for Metaverse and Web3
The internet is changing. What at first sight appears to be a bunch of disconnected buzzwords and developments recently flying through the digital space is a single, huge digital revolution taking off as you read this.
The talk is about the Web3 with its credo “read, write and OWN”. It is about new ways to organize people in DAOs (decentralized, autonomous organizations). And it is about the expansion of our digital experience into the physical world via virtual and augmented reality, called the Metaverse.
All these developments point in the same direction: They all drastically deepen our digital experience and progressively blur the lines between the digital and the physical world. In the future we will own our own data and digital identities, organize in democratic digital societies independent of which state we live in and we will share digital assets and money without any middlemen or centralized banks.
In short: what we are witnessing is the fourth industrial revolution.
But there´s a hook: All these developments require distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) that are much more powerful than any network running today.
Technologies today are not advanced enough to enable a fully realized Web3 and Metaverse. High fees, low throughput and low composability between protocols are major, unresolved roadblocks.
As of today, there is not a single DLT that would be able to handle the fourth industrial revolution. We are talking millions of tps, fully dynamic and seamless transactions between protocols of a myriad of digital assets — from crypto-currencies, NFTs, tokenized assets, digital identities and many more — all running in parallel on multi-asset networks and with great user experience.
The problem here is the monolithic “one-chain-fits-all” dogma that is still going viral within the cryptocurrency space. People still try to run EVERY smart contract inside one single blockchain (like Ethereum, Cardano or Solana) and therefore inescapably run into unbearable fees and clogged networks, even at comparatively tiny global usage. Developers try to fight their way out by deploying layer 2 solutions on top of these monolithic chains, still not questioning the fundamental dogma. In consequence, many already run into the same problems: If everyone would use one of these L2´s they would quickly be clogged and plagued by exploding fees too. To make things worse, smart contracts that run in different L2´s cannot call upon each other´s output anymore, which destroys one of the fundamental pillars of rapid progress: composability (“Lego-like” building of complex programs).
IOTA fixes that
IOTA is famous for its daring technological concepts, from feeless transactions to its fundamental data-structure (a DAG, not a blockchain). Recently, the IOTA Foundation revealed their solution for near infinitely scalable and interoperable scaling solutions: The IOTA smart contract protocol (ISCP) and the Assembly network.
IOTAs core idea is to put its smart contracts not inside the base-layer, like Ethereum and others do, but fully on the second layer with individual IOTA smart contract chains. Each smart contract chain is in every regard its very own blockchain, with its own validators that only process their own, internal smart contracts. No need to worry anymore about every little crypto-kitty dApp and smart neighborhood in La Ligula, Chile, eating up very limited shared blockchain throughput and thereby raising fees. IOTA smart contract chains can control addresses on the shared base-layer, IOTAs Tangle, to create and send around cryptocurrencies (plural!), NFTs, custom coins and digital identities. All these digital assets can run in parallel on IOTAs multi-asset ledger. Other smart contracts can them pick up and use them inside their own smart contract chain ecosystem. A multiverse of interconnected ecosystems appears, all connected by a feeless connective tissue: IOTAs Tangle.
The upsides of this approach are obvious:
-> Near infinite, horizontal scaling
-> Individual smart contract chains are fully customizable
- Free choice of fee structure (even feeless smart contracts!)
- Free choice of programming language
- Free choice of validators
The missing puzzle piece: IOTA Assembly network
Up until now, a major piece in making IOTA smart contracts fit to support the digital revolution was missing: The validators needed to be chosen by the smart contract creators, effectively allowing only permissioned smart contracts.
However, the IOTA foundation just published its solution for both horizontally scaling AND decentralized smart contracts: the Assembly network ($ASMB).
This network acts as a validator marketplace. Smart contract validators (= node owners) can join the Assembly network and work up their reputation by offering a high stake as well as providing a history of good behavior.
A smart contract owner that wants to let their code run decentralized can ask the Assembly network for validators of a certain quality (i.e. minimum stake, minimum reputation, etc.) and offer fees in exchange. Validators that fit these requirements get automatically and randomly assigned to validate these smart contracts. If a validator misbehaves (even if it did not yet affect the outcome of the smart contract, because there was a majority of honest validators), its stake and reputation gets slashed and it gets removed from the validator pool.
This means IOTA smart contracts solved the crypto trilemma on the smart-contract level:
Horizontal scaling = Near infinitely scalable
Individual smart contract chains = FAST smart contracts
Assembly network = Fully permissionless smart contracts
Metaverse can start soon™ — Facebook (now “Meta”) and Winkelvoss brothers searching for Metaverse technology
This technological jump in crypto technology comes right at a time where industry giants like Meta and crypto-legends like the Winkelvoss brothers are raising hundreds of millions of Dollars in order to build the Metaverse and Web3. Meta pledged to create a whooping 10.000 jobs related to building the Metaverse in Europe alone — the place of IOTAs strongest presence, with several EU, nation states and industry projects running as well as the official seat of the IOTA Foundation. They are actively looking for technology that can enable their visions and although we are entering here the realm of speculation it is clear that they will only be able to pick fully interoperable and hyper-scalable DLTs as a base-layer for their endavours.
On top of that the IOTA Foundation said there is over a dozen partners involved in the start of the Assembly network, which will be revealed over the coming weeks. These partners were strategically chosen to represent different markets and regions and pledged to invest at least $180 mil. into Assembly ecosystem building. With this starting package a very high visibility towards Winkelvoss and Meta is highly ensured. It will be exciting to follow future announcements regarding IOTA in regards of Metaverse, Web3 and DAOs
Sources:
IOTA smart contracts: https://blog.iota.org/iota-smart-contracts-beta-release/
IOTA Assembly network: https://assembly.sc/
Meta 10.000 Jobs in Europe to build Metaverse: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/18/facebook-jobs-eu-metaverse-social-network
Winkelvoss raise money to build Metaverse: https://www.bsc.news/post/the-winklevoss-twins-raises-400-million-for-a-decentralized-metaverse
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