Blockchain Thought Leaders — Feature 3
Blockchain thought leaders is a series where I speak to pioneers working in the blockchain space to learn their thoughts. The series is mostly technology focused, and tries to help developers get to know more about the various blockchain products and how they work.
Today’s feature is Murat Akdeniz, the founder of Mirian. He got involved in the crypto space when he started trading bitcoin and read the Satoshi whitepaper in 2010. While doing his Tech MBA from Cornell Tech, Murat worked on an application called String, which used Blockchain as a backend and since then has been researching and building blockchain apps. When he noticed an important missing piece in the blockchain ecosystem, he founded Mirian.
About Mirian
Mirian is a next generation social wallet which allows friends and family to invest together. Mirian allows friends to pool money and make investments together by joining a peer wallet. The Mirian mobile application will be available for download soon. Then, users can establish their social wallets, start inviting friends and invest together. Further, there will also be a social feed where user can see what investments their friends have made, enabling sharing of investment activities and knowledge in order to make better financial decisions.
Eventually, Mirian plans to have public peer wallets, where any user can start an investment and any others users can join the peer wallet to make investments with them. Mirian wants to enable a sharing economy in investments by making it cheaper and more convenient for people to raise money.
How does the wallet work?
Mirian uses a smart contract engine built on top of ethereum. When a user downloads and opens the Mirian mobile app, the keys for the wallet are automatically generated and smart contract is launched. If a user wants, they can also bring in keys they hold already into the application. Users can also specify the addresses they want to create the wallet with, and specify what capabilities they want the wallet to have.
This wallet is a peer wallet that can be shared between users who decide to invest together. A user who generates a wallet can invite their friends and family to join the wallet. The smart contract of the wallet has functions that different members (users) of a particular wallet can call. There are also functions specific for the investment leader of the wallet.
Also important to note is that, Mirian’s way of generating keys is far more secure than most wallet apps in the market today. Most apps generate keys in memory which is not secure as there is a chance that other apps could read the wallet’s byte-code. Mirian generates keys in a hierarchically deterministic way using a truly random number. This approach is not susceptible to attacks that affect most traditional wallets.
Given that Mirian is built on top of ethereum blockchain, how will Mirian scale to handle thousands of transactions?
Mirian uses a Plasma chain, a second-layer solution, along with the main Ethereum chain to improve scalability. While the cost for each transaction on Ethereum chain is high, the transaction costs on plasma chain are almost negligible, which enables users to conduct more transactions. Mirian’s plasma chain is a custom solution built using OmiseGO’s MVP plasma implementation. In Mirian, for every block, the the block’s header is submitted to the plasma validator. ERC-20 tokens are sent to the plasma contract, and are received in the peer wallets. The transactions and application run on plasma, and the transaction settlement is done on Ethereum. Using this approach, Mirian is able to provide cheaper and faster computation on plasma, while still providing the security and decentralization of Ethereum.
That’s great. Speaking of scalability, what are some of the other challenges blockchain technology has in general?
- Adoption: There is an issue of image with cryptocurrencies. Few years back, Bitcoin was famous for its user as a currency to buy drugs and other illegal items as people used anonymous wallets to hide their identity and conduct bitcoin transactions. Eventually, this stigma was overcome and Bitcoin begun being widely used for other purposes. But then again, after the huge number of ICOs for various blockchain projects last year, some of which were bad projects or scams, people have become skeptical again. Losing a lot of money on ICOs last year, has generated a negative perception of cryptocurrencies. Further, most people do not understand the technology behind it enough to appreciate it.
- Hurdles in blockchain inter-connectivity: There are several blockchains in the market, but they don’t connect with each other, and transfer of tokens or information between them is very difficult at the moment.
- Smart contract security: If there is any exploitable bug in the code, or if a developer forgot to initiate/trigger something in the code, that could be very bad for any blockchain application.
Mirian wants to get software developers educated on the blockchain, best practices in security to help tackle some of these challenges.
What is Mirian looking for from the blockchain community?
Mirian is looking for early stage beta testers — would like to get feedback on social wallets, useful features, suggestions for additional features. Also looking for developer interns.
Checkout Mirian’s website: https://mirian.tech/
In general, how would you recommend people get started with blockchain development?
The best way is to go online and read articles, white papers, plasma research by ethereum foundation. A website called ChainShot, started by 2 of Murat’s friends, offers great resources to learn how to build decentralized applications from scratch. Participating in Reddit, local conferences or hackathons like ethBerlin or others is really helpful getting started in the space.
Thank you for reading.
