Rchain overview

Published in

Coinsolidation

7 min readJun 8, 2018

Full story available at https://coinsolidation.io/reviews/rchain/

The open-source RChain project is building a decentralized, economic, censorship-resistant, public compute infrastructure and blockchain. It will host and execute programs popularly referred to as “smart contracts”. It will be trustworthy, scalable, concurrent, with proof-of-stake consensus and content delivery.

It aims at becoming a blockchain solution with industrial-scale utility, for which RChain must provide content delivery at the scale of Facebook and support transactions at the speed of Visa.

Rchain — Synereo fallout

On December 12, 2016, after weeks of contention, the shareholders of Synereo LLC voted to cancel CTO Greg Meredith’s employment contract and remove him from the board. It boils down to an unresolvable disagreement between Synereo’s CTO (Greg Meredith) and CEO (Dor Konforty).

Synereo was pitched to investors as a decentralized social media platform built on top of a innovative tech stack — Rchain. Shortly after successfully raising $4.7 million dollars in a crowdsale, Greg Meredith publicly accused Dor Konforty of attempting to starve the Rchain project and asked for his resignation. For his part, Dor expressed that he had lost confidence in Greg’s ability to deliver a useable Rchain product in time for Synereo’s planned 2017 rollout. The Synereo project stalled, gripped in deadlock, until the shareholders voted to oust Greg.

RChain then launched a token swap program which allowed users to swap Synereo’s AMP for RChain’s RHOC. The primary reason for having this swap was to allow AMP investors who invested because of the RChain technology to swap over to the new project. However, it should be noted that RChain did receive valuable AMP tokens for this swap.

Links:

FAQ Document

https://www.rchain.coop/

https://www.rchain.io/

https://developer.rchain.coop/

Architecture

RChain’s architecture was designed after a branch of mathematics called mobile process calculi in an effort to maximize the platform’s scalability. The platform can support multiple blockchains, both public and private even on the same node. The blockchains are secured through Proof of Stake consensus protocol.

Architecture document: http://rchain-architecture.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Funding/Token distribution

During 2017. there were two private sales of RHOC tokens, in August (0.20$/RHOC) and December (0.35$/RHOC). A total of around 45 million (15mil + 30mil) USD was raised, distribuing around 240 million tokens.

RHOC Token Quick Facts

Initial Sale Price: $0.20
Second Sale Price: $0.35
Current Market Price: $1.30
Market Cap
Token Type: ERC-20 (until mainnet, Q4 2018)
In circulation: 359,465,666
Total Suply: 1,000,000,000
Burned so far: 129,336,426
Remaining Supply: 870,663,574
Mineable: No
Consensus Algorithm: Proof of Stake

https://github.com/rchain/reference/blob/master/finance/rhoc.md

In Q4 2018 (after launch of Rchain mainnet) RHOC will be swapped for REV on a 1:1 ratio.

Comparison with Bitcoin
http://rchain-architecture.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction/comparison-of-blockchains.html

Plans and potential

40.000 + transactions per second per namespace
industry oriented
educating developers by organizing developers retreats
updates in the form of RChain Developer Retreat Roundup
opening offices on all continents (currently opening in Berlin)

Roadmap

https://rchain.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CORE/pages/105709609/Roadmap

How Rchain works

Today, blockchain platforms lack industrial grade scalability and speed. RChain is natively concurrent because the model of computation is designed to be concurrent from the ground up. It includes a new virtual machine called the Rho Virtual Machine, a new concurrent programming language called Rholang, and a new proof-of-stake consensus protocol being built by Vlad Zamfir and Michael Birch. In early February, the RChain SDK was publicly released as the team continues to work towards Mercury, the platform’s mainnet launch. To test out the SDK and stay updated on RChain’s progress, join the community here: https://developer.rchain.coop.

Rho Virtual Machine Environment

At the center of the platform, the Rho Virtual Machine Execution Environment allows RChain’s applications to achieve incredible speed and scalability. The Rho Virtual Machine Execution Environment can run multiple Rho Virtual Machines all at the same time. When necessary, The Rho Virtual Machine simply creates new instances of Rho Virtual Machines to handle the new load.

Smart Contracts

On RChain, smart contracts are written in Rholang. Rholang stands for reflective higher-order language. The language supports internal concurrent programming. It makes contracts fast and versatile by design. Secure and correct by construction, the platform’s smart contracts follow a formal verification method that allows them to be highly scalable. The Rho Virtual Machine then compiles and executesthe contracts.

Namespaces

Unlike most blockchains that use public keys to distinguish virtual address spaces, RChain divides its virtual address space into namespaces. In the simplest terms, a namespace is a set of named channels that are used to communicate the location of a network resource. Namespaces allow smart contracts on one blockchain to be visible to system contracts elsewhere on the network. Namespace developers can also use tools and properties to improve system encryption and protocols.

Core Team

Greg Meredith (President of RChain Cooperative)

Greg is the President of The RChain Cooperative. Previously he has worked as Principal Architect of Microsoft’s BizTalk Process Orchestration, Principal Architect of Microsoft’s Highwire offering as well as Principal Architect of ATM Network management solution for ATT/NCR and Co-designer and developer of MCC’s Rosette/ESS technology.

Nash Foster (CEO Pyrofex)

https://twitter.com/nashefoster?lang=en

Pyrofex Corporation — Working exclusively with the R-Chain Cooperative to develop an industrial-scale blockchain platform using the latest in formal methods and type theory. R-Chain will make it possible to deploy smart contracts at Google scale, while remaining confident they are safe and secure. Team of developers is 15 strong.

Lawrence Lerner (CEO Pithia Inc.,“The RChain Enablers”)

https://twitter.com/RevInnovator

Pithia Inc. (ex RChain Holdings) is commercializing the RChain platform, and Lawrence is Chief growth officer. Holdings supports those building decentralized consumer and enterprise-connected applications on the RChain platform. They evangelize the RChain Platform as an open-source project available to all; invest in startups/esatblished companies/new joint ventures; fund corporate forms for solutions for specific problems in the blockchain ecosystem; sponsor efforts to uncover and solve problems that may not even have been recognized previously.

Ed Eykholt (Founder and Board Member at Pithia Inc.)

Founder and Board Member. Ed has over 30 years of experience in the technology industry, managing products and software teams in complex and mission-critical domains such medical imaging and electric grid management, as well as software development tools teams at Rational Software and Microsoft. While at Rational he led the industry standardization of the Unified Modeling Language. Ed is also a co-founder of RChain Cooperative, serving as a Board Member through 2017).

Vlad Zamfir

Vlad Zamfir is a prominent researcher and commentator in the blockchain ecosystem. He is most known for his research and design work on Casper, the Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol for the Ethereum project and is working on a Casper for Rchain. Vlad joined Co-op’s Board of Directors in September 2017.

Kenny Rowe

Kenny is a Board Member and the Chief Operating Officer. An entrepreneur who brings a focus on governance, community building and collaboration to projects across the blockchain industry. Kenny currently serves as head of operations at MakerDAO as well as a senior consultant at CoinFund. Kenny founded the Seattle Ethereum Meetup group and previously spent eight years working in ecommerce for Newell Brands in various management roles.

Evan Jensen

Evan is the Secretary of The RChain Cooperative. Evan is an attorney with special interest in progressing crypto-related law. Evan is also legal counsel for The RChain Cooperative

Ian Bloom

Ian is a Open-source, linux, and DAO enthusiast. Worked as a Microsoft Software Engineer for AEGON, Computer Security Specialist for Fortress Technologies & Kroll.

Hendrick J. Hillbolling

Working since 1989 in the IT business with a degree in Business Management in 1990, University of Groningen, NL. With friends raised the Association NetYes that made the digital city of The Hague. In 1997 I joined AtosOrigin as a CRM consultant. Currently is in the position of blockchain consultant with focus on social communities, attention economy and remuneration of creators instead of third parties.

Reviews and interesting talks/links

Coinsolidation is an association of researchers and different industry specific experts, voluntarily united to analyse the upcoming projects in the crypto technology space. Stay in touch by following us on our Telegram channel or subscribe to our Medium publication. Visit our webpage for the full story http://coinsolidation.io/

Rchain overview

Written by Coinsolidation