Let’s explore cross chain with the aelf mainnet up and running
Hello Everyone! I hope you all had a good weekend.
First of all, I would like to thank Jinse Finance for inviting me to share with you the latest developments of aelf and what to expect from the year of 2021.
After a long and arduous development process, aelf has launched the mainnet last December. Unlike most of the projects with only simple functions such as producing block in the initial stage, aelf’s mainnet offered a lot more. aelf’s mainnet contains all the functions in the whitepaper, as well as complete development and supporting tools, such as wallet, explorer and some core DApps, such as decentralized exchange and random number generator. This means that aelf offers a complete blockchain system and supporting tools, which is a powerful weapon ready for use. aelf has done a good job in exploring the infinite possibility of cross chain and ushering in the era of booming public chains!
As we all know, there are dozens of blockchain systems on the market today, each of which has its own unique characteristics and can meet the needs of different users. But each system is independent, and they can not communicate with each other. This is just like the countries in the Cold War, which did not do foreign trade at all, but solely relied on domestic demand. And cross chain is to achieve international trade and help blockchains “go global”. The difficulty of such a task is self-evident. We still use the concept of globalization as an analogy, which includes how to confirm each other’s status in trade, how to communicate with each other, and how to ensure security. These are the cross chain capabilities that projects like aelf and Polkadot have realized in different ways.
To start, I would like to mention a few features of the aelf mainnet. If these features are closely linked, they will unleash the infinite potential of cross chain.
1. aelf’s side-chain framework will build a booming ‘one chain, one scene’ ecosystem
aelf provides a complete blockchain development framework that enables the rapid construction of aelf’s side chain. This side chain has complete blockchain functionality, including consensus mechanism, communication protocols, smart contract support and so on. With the side chain framework, developers can easily build DApps, greatly reducing the learning cost. Compared with Polkadot, aelf’s framework is like a substrate in Polkadot, but is simpler and more versatile.
aelf believes that a blockchain system with cross chain capability should be in a portable and professional multi-chain mode, that is to say, different functions and industry applications should run on different blockchains. In this way, firstly, it can ensure that different applications can run smoothly without interfering with each other. Secondly, it can infinitely expand the performance of the whole blockchain system. By adding more side chains, more transactions can be processed in parallel to achieve scaling, which is the biggest bottleneck of the current blockchain system. That is why aelf proposed the concept of “one chain, one scene”, which builds different side chains in the ecosystem to meet different application needs. For example, a series of scenarios that we have been optimistic about, such as decentralized finance, voting, transparent governance, decentralized storage and so on, will have their specific side chains in the aelf ecosystem. We will not encounter the problem of the whole Ethereum network being congested due to the popularity of one single application. It is precisely because of such technical advantages that we have established the Blockchain Laboratory with Tianjin University to promote the implementation of aelf technology in China. We have successfully applied blockchain technology to handling government affairs in Xiong’an and Tianjin, and there will be more good news in the future. I hope you will continue to support us.
I would also like to talk about another interesting point here, that is, aelf’s side chains are highly customized modular structure, in which you can easily change the consensus mechanism and so on. We believe that in the near future, there will be more than one side chain based on POW in the aelf ecosystem, so that everyone can enjoy the efficiency brought by POS and the high security brought by POW. Here, developers may use aelf to build more interesting side chains, whether it’s based on POW, POS, POC, etc. aelf’s structure is able to support such a flourishing ecosystem.
2. Interconnected blockchains open up unlimited possibilities
When a booming aelf ecosystem has been built, the next step is to let different blockchains interact and cooperate with each other, which is the core of cross chain. In the aelf technical system, all chains have followed some basic frameworks, such as consensus, communication and so on. This solves 60% of the problem of cross chain technical standards. The next problem to be solved is how to carry out safe and reliable cross chain communication. Unlike the hub used by Cosmos and the relay chain used by Polkadot, aelf implements the solution of Merkle tree root in the main chain. The advantage of this scheme is that it does not need to verify all the blockchains, but only the Merkle tree root, which is less difficult and smaller in size, can do cross chain verification faster and better. Moreover, in this way, each chain only needs to confirm each other’s transaction once on the main chain, and does not need to confirm with different chains, which greatly improves the efficiency.
In the months of testnet test conducted by aelf, we have been able to make transfers between side chains very easily, and we can also use cross chain communication to invoke smart contracts on different side chains. If you use aelf wallet now, you can easily transfer money between different side chains, and the confirmation time is less than half a minute. This means that we can cooperate with different applications on aelf in the future. For example, the information on the side chain of a digital ID can be easily called by other side chains, such as in games or a social DApp. Or different regions of government DApps can achieve interoperability, so that we are no longer restrained by regions and borders. To make this happen, the aelf main chain will play a crucial role.
aelf’s cross chain solution does not stop there. In addition to the cross chain between homogeneous chains, we also hope to achieve the cross chain between heterogeneous chains, that is, the interaction with a series of public chains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. In this regard, aelf has developed the Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol, and has successfully completed a transfer of US $310,000 between Ethereum and aelf last year. The Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) is not a one-way channel, instead, it allows assets to move freely between Ethereum and aelf. This is also the technical basis for swap token on the aelf mainnet in the future. Its core technology is also based on Merkle tree root to achieve status confirmation. Imagine a future where aelf, Bitcoin and Ethereum can interact with each other without any barrier.
3. aelf side chain, resource tokens auction, and market supply and demand regulation
Now you have an idea of the powerful ecosystem scenarios that aelf’s side chain and cross-chain technology can build in the future. It is like a continent pieced together by multiple countries, each side chain is the land of a country, and the right to use the land will be determined by resource tokens. In other words, when developers and users want to launch their own applications on aelf, they need to have a certain amount of resource tokens. And if the demand is particularly high, they need enough resource tokens to build their own side chains. In the aelf ecosystem, the amount of resource tokens is limited. With the number of side chains and DApps on the rise, the supply and demand of individual resource token will change dynamically, which means people need to spend more money to get them. Resource tokens can be obtained by staking ELF, which means that users and ELF holders who realize the value of resource tokens earlier will be able to get them earlier.
Then some users may ask, the increase in resource token price is definitely good for nodes and ELF holders, but at the same time it raises the cost of running applications on aelf and is not conducive to the ecosystem development. In this case, aelf has two solutions. First, aelf will launch three free public side chains on the mainnet for people to test their own applications, where any application can run for free for a period of time, allowing people to run DApps on aelf without cost. However, at the end of the trial period, those DApps without users will be eliminated by better DApps while the good ones will have enough users to purchase resource tokens. If they still feel it is not realistic to purchase resource token, aelf also offers resource token crowdfunding, allowing the community to support some of their favored DApps to run on the side chain, and in return, some of the revenues in the DApps will go to the community as the reward for supporting the DApps in the first place. It would be similar to the parallel chain auction on Polkadot.
I hope now you can have a better idea of the special cross-chain mechanism of aelf and the operation mode of the resource token in the future, so that you’ll be able to know where the future opportunities lie on aelf.
Some of our users may ask, cross chain sounds very good, but where will it be applied to? aelf believe that cross-chain will first be applied to decentralized transactions for the following reasons:
- Base on the cross chain technology, more assets can be freely exchanged and are not limited to assets on a specific chain
- Decentralized transactions are now mainly done on Ethereum, but the sky-high gas fee has stymied its development and is also a big headache for users. Cross-chain transactions on aelf can provide fast settlement capabilities with extremely low fees, greating enhancing the user experience
So, the cross-chain scenario that aelf has done a lot of promotion lately will focus on decentralized transactions. And the aelf team is probably the one with most knowledge of exchange and transaction logic among all public chain teams.
- aelf team’s core developers have all been involved in developing and maintaining major exchanges and have extensive experience in user asset security, user experience and trading products. One of the core parts of blockchain is ledger and transaction mechanism. The aelf team has tapped into our experience in security, efficiency and other aspects in our development.
- aelf has thus launched a centralized asset management system (CAM) to help exchanges, users and project owners manage user assets on the exchange more efficiently, by creating a system of virtual addresses, multiple levels of quota authorization and other features that allow user assets to be stored securely in the CAM and require authorization from different roles depending on the size of the quota. CAM also effectively allows users to hold the voting rights to their assets without handing them over to the exchange. This is especially important in POS and in systems with efficient governance like aelf. Currently, aelf has completed the development of CAM and is already working with exchanges, with the hope that in the future CAM will become the standard security solution for assets on all exchanges.
- We mentioned before that aelf wants to extend the breadth and depth of decentralized finance (DeFi) with our cross-chain tech and technical advantages. We have successfully launched SashimiSwap, an all-in-one trading platform for decentralized trading, lending and yield farming on Ethereum. The project is already operating smoothly with the technical support of the aelf team and community, providing users with great returns and smooth trading experience. In the future, we will merge SashimiSwap with aeswap on aelf to form a decentralized cross-chain trading network.
Looking ahead to the year of 2021, we are full of confidence that with aelf’s years of efforts and the smooth launch of the mainnet, we can explore infinite possibilities through the cross-chain tech, a slew of applications and quality services. Please stay tuned.
Thank you all again for taking your time to listen to me today. Finally, I’ve also got a little surprise for you, a preview of a very exciting campaign on the aelf mainnet. We plan to launch aelf mainnet’s full function tryout in a week or so. All ELF holders can get additional ELF (mainnet token) by staking the ERC20 ELF token and join Lucky Draw on the aelf mainnet. We’d like to express our gratitude to aelf users by offering great rewards worth 1.4 million RMB for your continued support, and we hope that you will be able to win a big prize before the Chinese New Year. Details about the upcoming campaign will be announced soon. Please stay tuned.
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