COTI Interoperability and Universal Payment Solution by Dr. Nir Haloani

COTI
COTI
Published in
7 min readJun 25, 2019

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COTI CTO, Dr. Nir Haloani

Introduction

The current technological landscape for blockchain makes it harder, if not impossible, to build a common interface for distributed ledgers. The ability to increase accessibility, link disconnected systems and enable quick value transfer are crucial factors that will drive the mass adoption of many fintech products.

COTI’s universal payment solution and cross-chain support are needed for the widespread adoption of blockchain applications and interoperability amongst them.
A number of COTI services can be imported by other chains, including dispute resolution, the trust score protocol, one-click payments and multi-currency ledger support.

COTI’s application is built in a way that provides the flexibility in supporting both the infrastructure and ledger layer of today’s most popular and promising infrastructures, such as Ethereum, Binance, Cardano, EOS, Bitcoin and NEO.

The crypto industry promotes different model designs favouring functional and performance aspects over others to meet specific business goals. Currently, there are more than a thousand digital currencies and tokens and thousands of blockchain projects under development in different sectors worldwide. The current blockchain ecosystem is too fragmented and complex, with progress being achieved in silos. The variation of blockchain designs and their possible configurations represent a hindrance for enterprises, software architectures and developers.

Heterogeneous development drives down blockchain interoperability and compatibility within blockchain networks, as well as existing traditional finance networks. In other words, the ability of blockchains to exchange information between themselves and with off-chain systems is adversely impacted. This lack of interoperability between networks and infrastructures is a threat to the widespread adoption of blockchain applications in technological and socio-economic frameworks.

Apart from the existing technical challenges, the lack of interoperability between ledgers also presents business risks. A major concern lies in how to increase interoperability between ledgers and assets while maintaining privacy in each one. Thus, as was the case with the Internet, it’s necessary to provide off-the-shelf software and development tools that simplify developing and deploying distributed ledger (DLT) applications without requiring developers to build certain components from scratch. By addressing the above risks, decentralised applications can grow and become increasingly interoperable and widely adopted.

Empowering the COTI ecosystem with multi-token support

In order to address the problem of blockchain interoperability, software reference architectures for blockchain interoperability should be set up. However, the majority of existing technologies connecting DLTs define an interoperability standard within their platform, not outside of it.

Integrating with legacy DLTs and others is challenging to implement, which is why selecting the correct technology is crucial. It is difficult to foresee which technology will be the most suitable, even in the short term without the uncertainty presented by other external factors such as technologies forking, becoming insecure, or being abandoned altogether.

In developing blockchain applications, the choice of underlying blockchain technology cannot be easily changed. Migrations aren’t always possible because transactions only have scope within their blockchain address space. Migrating applications is a problem that will soon apply to solutions running on Ethereum. This is an endless challenge, and the solution doesn’t merely lie in designing better and smarter blockchains. Front-end technologies of today will become obsolete in a few years due to planned and unplanned obsolescence.

To solve these issues, COTI presents a multi-token strategy and interoperability solution that will support:

  1. Communication among different DLTs for cross-ledger operations.
  2. Adaptable technology that can change to meet new sector-specific requirements and regulations.
  3. Abstracting ledger dependent technology to overcome the limits of various architectures, regardless of addresses, ledger implementation and consensus mechanisms.
  4. Building apps based on COTI’s ecosystem using other infrastructures, while powering any network with COTI’s unique infrastructure capabilities.
  5. The ability to easily support any other infrastructure and integrate it with payment and stable coin apps.
  6. Seamlessly integrating a host of COTI services to enrich other infrastructure networks, e.g.: arbitration, payment requests and trust scores.

COTI’s universal cross-chain payment solution

One of today’s challenges related to distributed ledgers is that they exist in silos. Various structures and working mechanisms make it harder, if not impossible, to build a common interface. Moreover, users generally have varying rights in different ledgers.

COTI’s application is built in a way that provides the flexibility in supporting the core level and ledger layer of today’s most popular and promising infrastructures, such as Ethereum, Binance, Cardano, EOS, Bitcoin, NEO etc.

In the COTI ecosystem, the core application layer supports more than one infrastructure through a dedicated bridge that can be embedded as an off-the-shelf solution independent of COTI’s core infrastructure and solutions.

Selected services that can be imported or used by other chains:

Dispute resolution enables users on any chain to benefit from comprehensive buyer-seller protections when transacting on any platform and ecosystem. The arbitration layer in COTI is a protocol designed to solve buyer-seller disputes. Disputes are resolved by an arbitration jury randomly selected from a large pool of highly trusted network participants.

The arbitration process (i.e. forming the arbitrator jury, securing evidence, selecting jurors, etc.) is fully decentralized and not susceptible to collusion or third party bias. By integrating with the COTI Trustchain’s arbitration layer, any chain or infrastructure will benefit from a dispute resolution token, which can serve as a buyer-seller protection mechanism. This is a feature that is largely absent from current crypto-based payment systems.

A transaction that is eligible to file a dispute on an external infrastructure will send the transaction to COTI’s cross-chain bridge. The transaction token used will then be swapped from the original payload token (e.g., ETH/BEP2) to COTI’s native token. Dispute cases will be opened and all interactions will take place through COTI’s arbitration system until the case is resolved.

Once the dispute is resolved, the dispute fee will be deducted. The refund or payment will then be sent to the winning party through COTI’s cross-chain bridge, which converts the transaction back to the original payload protocol.

The Trust Score Protocol enables efficient behavioural tracking, which maintains trust scores for all consumers and merchants on any chain or infrastructure.

COTI has developed a ranking mechanism to track the behavioral data of network entities, which is crucial for any service and infrastructure. Malicious parties are actively identified and addressed, while reputable behaviour is incentivised. Moreover, the engine is customized per each use case, as each industry faces varying levels of risk.

Trust Scoring is integrated into the original infrastructure through the Trustchain Protocol’s API. The original protocol first sends a request to the TrustScore node with the user’s hash/address. The TrustScore node then returns the current Trust Score associated with the user’s hash. All transactions are sent to the TrustScore node, which supports all infrastructure transaction payloads as input. Certain events can impact the Trust Score of a given user, e.g., disputes, disreputable behavior, etc.

One-click payments add a frictionless payment option to any chain or infrastructure. Most blockchain platforms don’t provide the infrastructure and tools required for embedding a Pay with PayPal-like button to accept digital payments simply and instantly. COTI has developed the Payment Request feature in its infrastructure as a solution for one-click payments. It provides consumers with the ability to make purchases without filling in personal details and forms during the checkout process. Using COTI’s Payment Request feature, any dApp can embed a payment button on e-commerce websites.

Multi-currency ledger support — some of the functionality supported by the COTI protocol can be based on other ledger infrastructures. For example, arbitration system staking and voting can be based on Cardano’s PoS and replace COTI’s current protocol. As part of this option, COTI will add support to other platforms and be based on their backend mechanisms when using other infrastructures.

So what’s next?

In the initial phase, COTI will be adding support for two additional tokens and will enable them to fully utilize COTI’s framework. This adds another level of liquidity support for the entire community. Additional token support in COTI’s platform can be seen as a liquidity chain of sorts and is akin to linking BTC on the Ethereum blockchain through bridges.

It is important to note that:

  1. It’s still the same total supply. Nothing will ever change with regard to that, and we will not dilute or tamper with the supply.
  2. There are no concrete requirements to swap tokens from our MainNet token to any other platform’s supported tokens. You will be able to switch from one side to another.
  3. We have developed a unique concept of Cross Platform Bridges, which is a way to enable interoperability and open our platform to any use case and protocol.

Conclusion

Universal payments and cross-chain solutions, together with infrastructure applications and use case offerings, are needed to boost the pace of real world infrastructure adoption.

Their ability to increase accessibility, link disconnected systems and enable quick value transfer is crucial to drive the mass adoption of many fintech products. Moreover, COTI’s cross chain and multi-infrastructure solutions will enable any network to become increasingly interoperable and widely adopted.

COTI Resources

Website: https://coti.io

Telegram: https://t.me/COTInetwork

Github: https://github.com/coti-io

Technical whitepaper: https://coti.io/files/COTI-technical-whitepaper.pdf

Token economy overview: https://coti.io/files/COTI-Token-Economy-2019.pdf

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COTI
COTI

COTI is the fastest and lightest confidentiality layer on Ethereum.