A Highly Practical Blockchain To Revolutionize Platform-Based Economy
Abstract.
Blockchain technology has been booming with a dozen of prevailing blockchain infrastructures or platforms since a couple of years ago, as much fueled by cryptocurrency speculators. Apart from cryptocurrencies, admitted that blockchain has made a significant leap forward from its original founder — Bitcoin, however there is still a huge gap between the technology development and its adoption in reality. There exist some main reasons to cause/explain the issue, including costliness, scalability and deployability problem. This paper introduces new blockchain Teragrid, which is a highly practical blockchain and novel infrastructure in order to seal the gap between blockchain development and its real-life adoption by enabling rapid development and painless deployment of blockchain technology in a wide range of business sectors. Teragrid provides a reasonable solution to tackle the current blockchain problems by building an infrastructure/platform with much deliberation on low cost, high scalability and customizability with modularity approach, firm security and privacy with multi-leagues concept, high deployability and adoptability with a built-in decentralized application Parkhill MVC (a.k.a Model-View-Controller) Framework.
Introduction
The idea of the first decentralized application in form of a digital currency building with blockchain technology was dated back in 2008 in the well-known whitepaper of Bitcoin authored by Satoshi Nakamoto. Subsequently, its first implementation came to life after one year in 2009, which finally proved that Bitcoin could successfully solve the double-spending problem without a need for trusted authorities or institutions. Even with its magnificent success, Bitcoin had been still known in a narrow business sector — finance as a cryptocurrency until 5 years later. By advent of a new blockchain platforms or infrastructures such as Ethereum in 2014, which allows to develop a wider range of decentralized applications not only cryptocurrencies, the new blockchain technology by the time considered as blockchain 2.0 had become the mainstream alongside with other leading technologies such as AI, IOT and VR to move our society forward. As a result, since its first original paper Bitcoin had opened a new horizontal for applying blockchain technology to many other industries to decentralize and automate our society as one.
Before the emerging of blockchain, the world has been witnessing the emerging and thriving of platform-based economy such as Ebay, Amazon or Alibaba. Those are online matchmakers or marketplaces which are labeled as centralized economy models. Platform-based economy has been developed and transformed through some new forms from its original version, such as social networks and achieved its peak with sharing economy model. Some top candidates of the next versions of platform-based economy include Facebook, Google, Youtube, Craiglist, Uber, AirBnb to name a few. As a matter of fact, the world we live has been driven and relied heavily on those platform-based economy models. However, it comes with its own risks and intrinsic problems.
A Highly Practical Multi-Chains Platform
Teragrid is designed and built to be a highly practical and novel blockchain infrastructure based on our throughout research on advantages and disadvantages of the up-to-date blockchain technology and its ecosystem. Teragrid blockchain is built with a mission to revolutionize marketplaces or platforms. We also have a long-term vision on building and enriching Teragrid ecosystem to boost the blockchain value and help contribute to transforming every aspect of society.
Technological Contributions
Teragrid is a multi-chains infrastructure, which allows running different blockchains with different consensuses depending on particular types of businesses. It offers a very high customizability by permitting users to setup their own network with specific network configurations such as block size and time which impact greatly to the performance and throughput of the network.
Transactions are made cross chains on Teragrid seamlessly, thanks to our “Leagues” and “Cells” concept. We provide an original approach to handle cross-chain transactions by using “Master League” or “Base League”. Tendermint uses Hub-and-Zone concept in its Cosmos network for supporting multiple blockchains and cross-chain transactions [15]. Unfortunately, there is a serious flaw in its design, because Hub is considered as a single point of failure which would have a severe disaster to the whole system if it fails. We, however, go beyond than that to question ourselves what would be done better if we could build the network from scratch? As the same question you could ask what would have been done if we could build the Internet with what we have today. The approach is going to be much different. Unlike Hub, BaseLeague has no single point of failure and it makes cross-chain transactions become timeless and effortless.
Parkhill is a powerful and flexible MVC blockchain framework, which enables a rapid development and deployment of decentralized applications cross industries. Like other MVC application frameworks in high-level programming languages, Parkhill is in charge of building a skeleton of an decentralized application for developers. Hence, they will only have to focus on business logic of their own application, other parts will be transparent to developers and taken care of by the framework Parkhill. What’s more, the heart of programmable blockchains (a.k.a Blockchain 2.0) is smart contracts or digital deals (a.k.a “Dcodes” in Teragrid). Therefore, Parkhill provides a set of handy modules for developing and running Dcodes or decentralized applications in general such as LawMaker, DealMaker, LeagueChain and Parkhill MVC Framework. LawMaker is the module which is responsible for creating and setting a consensus protocol for a particular blockchain or league in Teragrid.
DealMaker is the Smart Contract Template Builder, which will help build and deploy a secure D-code effortlessly. LeageChain is the distributed blockchain storage for managing and storing valuable data such as transactions in one or more leagues or inner blockchains of Teragrid.
Parkhill MVC Framework is a built-in Web and Rest MVC framework for rapid development and deployment of a Web-based decentralized application or REST-based Web APIs.
In term of blockchain consensus, for now we choose Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) [16] as the default consensus for Teragrid Network, after investigating and examining carefully the available consensus algorithms and corresponding blockchain infrastructures. We also have a plan to support several built-in prevailing consensus algorithms in Teragrid to meet diversified requirements of different businesses. Last but not least, in order to grow and strengthen Teragrid blockchain infrastructure, we have in our roadmap to build SDK, API and other supporting development tools for Dcodes developers.
Business Contributions
Two key components in Teragrid ecosystem are TeraCoin and TeraWallet. They will facilitate cross-chain payments and transactions seamlessly. TeraCoin is our built-in cryptocurrency which shares the same characteristics with Bitcoin, Ether and so on. TeraWallet will be used by our users in Teragrid Network to manage their cryptocurrencies, tokens, and perform payments and transactions with other TeraWallets in the network in the most convenient way. Furthermore, as we notice the importance of having a secure and private communication among users in the network, Teragrid also develop an in-house messaging application named TeraTalk.
Apart from our core applications, Teragrid has a long-term vision and strategy to partner with other businesses to work closely with them for developing and deploying their decentralized applications on our blockchain infrastructure. We strongly believe that by emphasizing our resources on supporting our partners, who possess great business experiences in their zone, to help them succeed what they are best at , it would eventually value much more to our customers and partners.
