What do you know about chains? Since you are here I suppose you clearly understand that chains could be made out of blocks. Blocks which are not even real. Digital blocks of data maintained by a huge community without any central entity! What a social breakthrough, isn’t it? But let’s get to the point.
Blockchain as a technology is being actively developed for almost a DECADE now and smart humans should have definitely come up with something new and interesting which modifies the blockchain technology itself.
In this article, we will be talking about the types of CHAINS out there you have definitely heard of but still might not have understood what they are.
Let’s begin with the multichain.
Lovely technology which we are so actively using in our project. What does it mean? Inter-blockchain communication (IBC) is more general term for the technology. From the name of it we can understand that it connects multiple chains.
How and why?
Let’s start with the existing solutions. EOS blockchain has blockchain interoperability possibilities between the EOS-type chains through the cryptographic proofs of actions in both chains. The algorithm is pretty hard to understand, but it can be useful in connecting the chains with a single type. You can read this article for more information.
Another IBC model is a Cosmos one which builds a tough communication model between different chains through hubs and zones designed to fit each other.
Ducatur solution is designed to be much simpler — we use DUC token as a connector between chains.
How does it work?
We deploy our token contracts into different networks (ETH, EOS, NEO for now) and build an Oracle that is capable of tracking what’s happening on several chains and can perform an exchange between different accounts in different networks. We will publish a separate article on this topic once every tech component is finished and released.
What’s more important is why do we really need cross-chain communication? Isn’t one chain enough for all the actions?
Blockchain world is being torn apart by a serious scalability problem. Multichain is needed to create much more scalable and usable DApps, it is needed to use all the efficiency of a huge diversity of networks and fit every possible user’s desire. Read our recent article about the multichain, so you can get what we mean more clearly here.
Another fascinating technology that literally CONNECTS to the chain world is side-chain.
It is closely linked to inter-blockchain communication, but has a different usage. Single blockchain has a consequent model of transaction computation which means that every pack of transactions is executed one after each other in every new block.
Side-chains is a nice way to make blockchain computation parallel.
A set of different chains connected to a single main chain will all have their own miners/validators which will make the performance skyrocket thanks to the parallel approach to computing. A side chain can validate a transaction using its own computational resources and then send it back to the main chain and validate it. There are many security issues around this topic at the moment which need to be maintained and closed so the new performance era for the whole sphere could begin.
We are really excited about the Ethereum 2.0 release with sharding technology that will enable this feature and many more. Looking forward to exploring it soon :)
Off-chain is a word that you hear from us really often.
We use it in meaning as something not on the blockchain. What could be? Data that we transfer into blockchain with our oracles or maybe a whole transaction of several Bitcoins recorded off the chain!
Everything looks clear with data — it is just not in the scope of blockchain and needs to be transferred into the blockchain somehow (we use Oracles for that)
But, how do you do that with a cryptocurrency and why would you even do this?
Blockchains are pretty slow and expensive nowadays. Once you push a transaction into network you need to wait for some time till the transaction gets mined and confirmed by other participants of the network, moreover you need to pay a transaction fee to the computer who has put it in the block for you.
Off-chain transaction is a popular solution which deals with both of the problems. The most popular implementation of it is payment channels. You simply put some of your Bitcoins in an off-chain place shared between you and other person, you lock these coins on the chain, so you want perform any double-spend trick and you can exchange them off-chain without any processing taken on-chain just because you don’t create any transactions! But, once you close your payment channel the total result of your swaps are recorded in the chain.
The most recognizable example is Bitcoin Lightning network which does what we have described above.
There are lots of connected technologies out there which highly increase the performance of the blockchains making them more usable and scalable. The range of the solutions presented is what should bring us all to the state of global adoption of the technology around the world which will move us all to more fair and secure world.
We are widely using and exploring the tech described in this article and hope that the whole community will gain more interest in these topics.
