A conversation with Kevin Wang of Nervos
I met with Kevin Wang, co-founder and research lead at Nervos, to chat about the technical design of the Nervos Network in anticipation of their upcoming token sale.
Justin Gregorius: Thanks for joining us, Kevin. What is Nervos CKB?
Kevin Wang: The Nervos Common Knowledge Base (CKB) is the layer 1 proof of work and store of value blockchain protocol of the Nervos Network. It allows any crypto-asset to be stored with the security, immutability and permissionless nature of Bitcoin. It also enables smart contracts and layer 2 scaling. Total network value is captured in the CKB token.
JG: What problems does Nervos CKB solve that other layer 1 blockchains have not?
KW: There is no current multi-asset platform that ensures long-term sustainability. Most platforms have unsustainable compensation policies for participants who provide security for the network, like miners, or have insufficient strategies for handling state growth, such as the “pay once, store forever” model. This poses a high risk for blockchains that store a variety of crypto-assets with increasing value. This also poses a risk to decentralization due to the inability for the average user to run a full node in the long term. Many features of the Nervos design, including its economic model, native token, and miner incentivization, come together to solve these challenges.
JG: The Nervos documentation says that the Nervos Network is “designed to best support on-chain state and off-chain computation.” What does that mean?
KW: The transaction structure of the Nervos Common Knowledge Base is similar to that of Bitcoin, with inputs and outputs, and the actual computation happens off-chain. The consensus process verifies the validity of the state transitions, instead of calculating the result of the state transitions. This makes the Common Knowledge Base a decentralized verification machine like Bitcoin (but with full scripting capabilities), instead of a decentralized computer like Ethereum. This model fits perfectly with a layered structure, where state generation happens off chain and the layer 1 chain is used mostly as a state settlement layer.
JG: Yeah the layered design is interesting. Can you talk about why you decided to go with this approach?
KW: We decided to go with a layered design because we wanted our layer 1 to be a public infrastructure that’s open, borderless, neutral, permissionless and censorship-resistant — just like the Internet itself — to serve as a universal store of value. To accomplish this, the layer 1 protocol in Nervos Network takes a limited role to take a no-compromise approach towards decentralization, and layer 2 can provide scalability, finality, privacy, compliance and application-specific priorities. Compared to sharding, we believe there’s much advantage in having non-divided global state for better user experience and facilitates composability.
JG: The layered design seems to play a big role in how Nervos handles state. How does that work?
KW: CKB uses the Cell model to handle “state”. Our model is a generalized version of Bitcoin’s UTXO model, retaining the consistency and simplicity of Bitcoin. All the states are stored in Cells, all computation is done off-chain, and all the verification work is handled by nodes. The Cell model is highly flexible due to the lower level at which the scripts execute.
Cells are essentially general-purpose state objects with clear ownership and state transition rules that can be used to express anything from token ownership to executable code. They can also be referenced and passed around in scripts or in between layers. Cells come with lock scripts just like Bitcoin UTXOs. In comparison, the Ethereum account model pools assets within smart contracts and have the assets exposed to the vulnerabilities of the contracts.
JG: Besides Bitcoin’s UTXOs influencing Nervos’s Cells, it seems that Bitcoin also influenced Nervos’s consensus model. But how is Nervos consensus different from Nakamoto consensus?
KW: Yes, CKB consensus is based on Proof of Work and Nakamoto consensus. It’s designed for openness, censorship resistance and high performance in distributed environments with network delay and Byzantine node faults.
Our algorithm (NC-Max) adjusts block difficulty in response to network conditions, increasing throughput when the network of nodes is well-connected and slowing it when the block orphan rate passes a certain threshold. With a responsive PoW algorithm, CKB makes use of the full bandwidth capacity of the network and can also seamlessly take advantage of innovation at the physical layer that would allow for more data transmission across the network.
Learn more about the Nervos CKB »
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