Interesting Blockchains and What They Do — 1 : Nebulas
In this series I’m going to let you guys in on the blockchains I like most. Disclaimer: I’m invested in most of these.
When people talk about the blockchain, most people think of Bitcoin or Ethereum. In reality though, there are lots and lots of different blockchains. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, Monero, JPMorgan’s Quorum, IBM’s Hyperledger, are all different blockchains. Some focus on privacy, others on enterprise, yet others on scalability. A unique blockchain works differently, and tries to tackle other things. I’m going to go over some, in my opinion, unique blockchains and talk about what they do.
The blockchains described here are not solely currencies, because those are less interesting to me. They’re more like general purpose platforms, think of Ethereum. If you want to know more about blockchain platforms, read my other post here.
There are a lot more blockchains out there that I probably don’t know about, but these are the ones that caught my attention.
I ) Nebulas
Nebulas isn’t your typical blockchain. The birth of Ethereum and Smart Contracts gave rise to a number of issues:
- No way of measuring value of different applications and smart contracts
- The ability to self-evolve, where changes can be implemented in a healthy way without hard-forking and splitting the community
- An ecosystem that incentivizes all participants of the blockchain to make itself future proof
At first this might seem like weird problems to tackle, but once we’ll go deeper, you will understand the significance of Nebulas.
Along with these three core technologies, come two more really interesting aspects:
- A decentralized search framework to find the best dApps or Smart Contracts (according to Nebulas Rank) for your problem
- A new consensus mechanism called Proof of Devotion
Let’s dive a little deeper.
Nebulas Rank
Bitcoin Blockchain represents a one-dimensional world where transactions take place peer-to-peer. Ethereum Blockchain has brought us a two-dimensional world with smart contracts and DApps. More and more apps are being built on Ethereum now. When the number of Blockchain DApps reaches that of a mobile app store, how users search and find the expected DApp would be a big challenge. — Hitters Xu, Founder of Nebulas
Nebulas, in its whitepaper, outlines the fact that with the rise of all sorts of Smart Contracts and dApps, the blockchain world, and Web 3.0, will need a universal measurement of value that applies to Smart Contracts, dApps, and even users. Behold Nebulas Rank (NR). By algorithmically exploring and analyzing on-chain activity, Nebulas Rank will be able to quantify the value of each entity on the blockchain.
NR will provide users with much deeper insights into the blockchain ecosystem, which will pave the way for better business decisions and research activity. NR will also serve the Nebulas Search Engine, as a way to explore Web 3.0 the same way Google allows you to explore Web 2.0, but in a decentralized manner of course.
Here’s a basic overview of how the NR measure of value will be deducted:
- Liquidity, e.g. the frequency and scale of transactions, is the first aspect that Nebulas Rank measures. Think of this analogy with exchanges: the more users are on an exchange, the better the liquidity, and thus the better the quality. It’s a positive feedback loop. A simple example would be for NR to rank DEXs, the ones with the most liquidity will be ranked the highest.
- Propagation, the scope and depth of asset liquidity, is the second measurement aspect. Propagation can be though of as the influence information of certain blockchain entities bring forth. Think of it as something going viral quickly — it indicates that there was a lot of value in the idea itself (e.g. CryptoKitties).
- Interoperability, the final dimension that NR measures. The amount of interaction blockchain entities can have with other blockchain entities will be very important in a transparent world of information. It’s important to count this in as well.
All the information will be sourced from on-chain data, since this is the most verifiable and accurate data to measure.
Proof of Devotion (PoD)
The problem with PoW is a waste of computing power. While PoS makes the rich richer. Nebulas developed the Proof of Devotion (PoD) algorithm. PoD also uses NR as the measure of value to identify the accounts with great devotion to the ecosystem and grant them the fair chances to be bookkeeper to avoid monopoly in bookkeeping.
Nebulas Rank, which is quite unique in the blockchain world, allows Nebulas to take other approaches regarding blockchain technicalities. One of these other approaches is its new consensus mechanism, Proof of Devotion. PoD allows for “influential” users, according to NR, to become bookkeepers and receive tx-fees and block rewards as incentives. Let me break it down:
- Users with an NR value higher than a specific threshold can be selected to become a bookkeeper (validator) by paying a security deposit,
- Through virtual mining, each bookkeeper candidate competes to earn bookkeeping rights,
- Users that have earned those rights, are responsible for block generation and thus receive the economic rewards,
- If any user behaves maliciously, their security deposit will be taken away and their Rank will go down drastically.
Think of it like this, PoD is basically PoS with another big factor: Reputation. If they mess up their bookkeeping duties, they will basically never have another chance at becoming one. (This does not account for Sybil attacks, however, where a user can forge multiple identities)
Proof of Devotion combines NEM’s Proof of Importance with Proof of Stake, to solve both PoI’s reversibility problem and PoS’s capital monopoly crisis.
Developer Incentive Protocol (DIP)
As the name itself says, developers of Smart Contracts and dApps, will be rewarded for their efforts. If their Smart Contracts or dApps, when deployed, reach a NR score that’s higher than a specified threshold, the developers will be rewarded in NAS.
The rewards that are given out by DIP will be recorded on-chain for everyone to see, which will attract more developers to try their hands at developing on the Nebulas blockchain and therefore create a positive feedback loop.
Nebulas Force
Human being’s DNA doesn’t not evolve through hard or soft forks. Instead, small mutations are integrated into our DNA system, a Blockchain-like decentralized one where each human being has a complete copy. Nebulas’ Blockchain system evolves in a very similar way.
Nebulas Force (NF) is used to address the evolving capability of the Nebulas blockchain and its application layer. This, combined with the other technical innovations, is the key to making itself future proof.
The data of basic protocols such as NR, PoD and DIP will be recorded on the Nebulas blockchain. More data will allow the basic protocols to upgrade, without the need of a hard fork. The blockchain and its entities built on top of it will literally be able to self-evolve.
NR of users and the community voting mechanism will be key to determining what should be upgraded and in which way the blockchain should evolve. With ever-growing data, incentives and positive feedback loops, the Nebulas blockchain has an immense amount of potential.
Developers will be able to test their blockchain innovations in all sorts of Virtual Environments: the Nebulas Virtual Machine, Sidechains and Sandboxes. And because Nebulas will utilize the LLVM-compiler, developers will be able to write code in their favorite languages.
If you want to know more, I highly suggest reading the following literature:
Thanks for reading!
