Connext and Spankchain Officially Partner!
This probably comes as a surprise to no one
We’re proud to announce that Connext and SpankChain have officially partnered up to bring state channels to the world!
TL;DR — What’s the Deal?
Connext worked with SpankChain to build Hub #1. Now, we’re partnering up to continue innovating. How do we fit together? Connext will work on Hub infra and bring Hubs to other businesses, Spank will operate on Connext’s Network and win the adult industry.
In other words: Spank is a trustless, XXX version of Stripe, Connext is a permissionless, micropayment version of Visa/Mastercard.
We’re separate orgs with different target markets, but mutually aligned in our vision of permissionless, scalable micropayments!
A Brief History of this Beautiful Lust Story
Connext and SpankChain first started to work together when we were working towards enabling card payments in the fall of 2017. Because Ameen and Arjun were already friends, SpankChain was the first organization we turned to when we realized that scaling would need to be solved before any kind of mainstream adoption could be possible.
It turned out that we had been independently experimenting with the same type of multihop state channel construction (Perun’s Virtual Channels), and that we had come to the same conclusions about creating usable channels in production: 1. that this was more of an engineering task than a research one because the vast majority of the work was in the UX of channelized systems and 2. with dedicated work, we could have something ready in a few months.
Since we were aligned in our goals, and mutually more interested in shipping than planning or talking, we decided to collaborate and just build the damn thing.
Finality Labs, a scalability research organization that has spun out of SpankChain, to modified Perun’s spec to make it useful for user-based interactions (rather than machine-machine payments) and wrote the core contract. Connext built the client-side infrastructure that wraps the contract, generates/signs/sends transaction payloads and manages disputes. Then, we upgraded SpankChain’s existing custodial payment channel hub to work with the new framework. Spankchain, and their development partner Kyokan, rebuilt their wallet and connectors to integrate all of the new code into their application layer, optimizing for smooth user experience by utilizing their beta camsite as a testing ground.
By structuring this way, we were able to move incredibly quickly on making the changes needed in every part of the stack, so that modifications at the lower levels could propagate upwards to create dramatic UX improvements for SpankChain’s real userbase.
We shipped the Spank Hub one month ago and, since then, have been asking ourselves: how can we continue to work together to bring this technology (and all of the wonderful things you can build with it) to everyone in this industry?
Towards a Channelized Future
Although we’ve been sharing a codebase for the past few months, we have realized that creating a usable, generalizable, scalable version of these Hubs will require innovation at different levels of the stack concurrently. We’ve decided that the best approach is to divide and conquer:
SpankChain (and Kyokan) will focus on the wallet and application layers, optimizing on the UX of interacting with their Hub. By providing the simplest, cheapest and most fair payment processing service, we believe they will become de facto payment service for the entire adult industry. Additionally, they will be Connext’s first Hub and, due to their blinding execution speed, will also be the testing ground for many of the new features and use cases that we will enable in the months to come.
Connext, on the other hand, will focus on the lower layers of the stack. We will work on generalizing the core contracts to enable more complex transactional use cases and will connect Hubs to form a network. We’ll also optimize the Hub infrastructure to optimize the UX of setting up and maintaining a Hub so that we can go from 1 to n Hubs as soon as possible. To SpankChain, Connext will be a core infrastructure partner, building and maintaining the open source technology that makes their ecosystem, and eventually the ecosystems of many, many other Hubs, work.
Our journey so far has just been the first step in bringing fair, efficient and scalable micropayments to the world. We’re incredibly excited to keep collaborating well into the future!
We hope you enjoyed this post! Get in touch with us by:
- Joining our Discord
- Tweeting at us
- Emailing us at support@connext.network
- Checking out our website
- Subscribing to our subreddit
- Following this medium account
You can also learn more about Spankchain by:
- Sign up for their beta camsite
- Check out their white paper
- Watch their introduction video
- Following them on Twitter
- Joining them on Discord
- Subscribe to their subreddit
