Considering EOS as Novusphere’s Blockchain Layer

At our last community meeting on May 6th the team discussed the possibility of using EOS as the blockchain layer of the project instead of the status quo plan of building an independent blockchain layer. Below, we’ve provided a comprehensive overview of the discussion. A coin vote weighted by atmos will be conducted to determine what direction the project follows.

Until the results of a coin vote can be evaluated, development has pivoted from working on the blockchain layer of the project to working on the application layer. With this pivot, we do not lose any time in terms of net development as it is something that would need to be built regardless, but it changes the priority and halts development on the testnet.

The application layer is the part of the project developers building interfaces such as one to watch/browse videos would be interacting with. It is agnostic to the underlying blockchain layer. It handles downloading metadata and further processing it so it can be stored in a database to later be queried by an interface. After the a minimal application layer has been developed, web developers can start building interfaces for Novusphere in advance and not need to worry about the decision of the underlying blockchain architecture.

Why EOS?

While Novusphere could be built on practically any blockchain such as Bitcoin, it’s significantly easier to build on a platform that supports smart contracts such as Ethereum. When we investigated the possibility of building on Ethereum and other blockchains early into the project the main issue we had was the fee model these blockchains force upon you.

For every operation you do, the user of your application must pay a fee. This is demonstrated through the recent memo.cash application developed on Bitcoin Cash where every action such as posting/replying, liking, etc. all require the user to pay a small fee in Bitcoin Cash. While at this time the fee may be small, fees add up and we have no way of ensuring that it’s always a lot fee. Further, “small” in terms of monetary value can mean very different things depending on your own economic situation. Regardless, we don’t see a platform that requires users to constantly spend money to participate seeing mass adoption.

EOS has similar smart contract functionality to Ethereum and works off a different economic model which is inline with our requirements for Novusphere. The bandwidth model EOS uses allocates resources to the user based on their EOS holdings. With the bandwidth model rather than charging a fee, transactions are free and how often a user can transact on the network (consume resources) is limited. Since a dapp developer can commit their resources to their dapp they can subsidize the resources for users of the dapp. This way, using the dapp is fairly seamless, further it doesn’t cost users to spend funds for every transaction operation. Onboarding a new user only requires them to create an EOS account, it does not require them to purchase any EOS. The only way dapps will see mainstream adoption is if they can feel as seamless as traditional applications users are use to using.

Pros

• Exposure to EOS community → easier to on board new community members/users
• Ease of interaction with other EOS applications (i.e. decentralized exchanges)
• Ease of exchanges listing — since no additional software needs to be ran by exchanges they don’t need to audit any code, only need to ensure token conforms to a standard token interface (i.e. ERC20 in Ethereum).
• Inherited security from EOS blockchain
• Inherited performance from EOS blockchain
• Economic model of Novusphere doesn’t significantly deviate from original plans
• Ecosystem of Novusphere doesn’t deviate from original plans

Cons

• EOS is still in development and rapidly changing
• Not as much control over underlying blockchain architecture
• Negative “FUD” surrounding EOS

Community — Coin Vote

Starting next week, we’ll be starting a coin vote. This coin vote will last until a minimal application layer is finished being developed. We expect this to take around 1–2 months, so it should be assumed that the coin vote will come to a conclusion by July 1st. Details on how to participate in the coin vote will be shared on the community Discord as well as covered in another blog post once coin voting has started.