Where is Dune ? A short Comparison of Dune with Bitcoin and Ethereum

There are hundreds of blockchains projects in the world, and it is sometimes difficult to understand why a new blockchain was created, and how it compares with others. This is typically the case for our blockchain, Dune Network. Maybe you heard that we want to bring trust into the smart contract world, and into the Bitcoin world through side-chain interoperability. Let’s try to better understand what it means, through a short comparison with the two major players, Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Dune vs Bitcoin

Bitcoin is by far the most important blockchain project: it has the oldest network, the biggest community and the largest capitalization. Bitcoin consensus is probably the most secure one, not because of its protocol, but because of the support of a community of miners that no other blockchain could gather. It makes Bitcoin the most resilient crypto-currency platform to date.

Compared to Bitcoin, Dune Network looks like a modest project, but with a great ambition: taking Bitcoin to the next level! Indeed, Bitcoin suffers from two major problems: the energetic cost of its consensus algorithm and the lack of smart contracts… and Dune Network comes with an answer to both of them.

Indeed, Dune is a green blockchain: Dune comes with a well-tested Proof-of-Stake consensus, Emmy+, inherited from its Tezos codebase, that has been running flawlessly since its launch. Transactions on Dune are almost energy-free: being a block validator on Dune, a miner in Bitcoin’s terminology or a baker in Dune’s terminology, does not require any important computational power, as validating a block only requires to sign it… and deposit a small part of your stake of DUNs. This consensus algorithm makes validation so cheap that anybody can start his own validation node, far from the cost of setting up a mining farm of ASIC for Bitcoin. Also, blocks are validated every minute, much faster than the 10 minutes of Bitcoin.

Dune also comes with powerful languages to write smart contracts. From its birth, Dune was designed to include several native languages: it inherited Michelson, a low-level stack-based strongly-typed language, from its Tezos legacy; Love, a high-level much more expressive language was released this month; other languages, easier to learn and to use, but less reliable, are expected to help for developer adoption. Dune smart contracts will soon be able to work both with Dune’s native token, the DUN, and other tokens, such as Bitcoin.

But Dune is not a competitor of Bitcoin! Instead, our goal is to work with Bitcoin, as a side-chain: as you can opt for a green energy supplier, Bitcoin users will be able to switch their Bitcoins to Dune to benefit from its energy-free transactions, and its smart contracts, while being able to go back to Bitcoin at anytime to benefit from its resilience and long time stability.

Some other blockchains have also taken this direction: Blockstream Liquid will provide faster transactions and confidentiality to Bitcoin, also as a sidechain. With the forthcoming support of Sapling, latest Zcash tech for shielded transactions and private accounts, Dune will provide similar features. The RSK blockchain also aims at bringing smart contracts to the Bitcoin world. RSK is based on Ethereum. If you want to trust smart contracts, Dune’s approach is much safer. To better understand this point, let’s now directly compare Dune with Ethereum!

Dune vs Ethereum

Ethereum is by far the most popular platform for smart contracts, especially token-issuing contracts like ERC20. Ethereum uses a low-level engine, the EVM, to execute smart contracts that can be written in several languages, the most popular being Solidity, and that can do almost anything (the machine is said to be Turing Complete), when Bitcoin script language can only execute a very small set of instructions.

However, Ethereum is also popular for the number of horrible stories of assets being stolen or frozen, due to bugs in Solidity smart contracts. The first famous one, a problem in the TheDAO, even caused a fork of the network. Two major problems arose also in a popular ERC20 library, done by Parity, leading to hundred of millions USD lost or frozen. Of course, any blockchain derived from Ethereum, such as RSK, will suffer from the same problems.

Dune improves on Ethereum by the choice of state-of-the-art technologies to minimize the risk of bugs: all its smart contract languages, low-level (Love and Michelson) and high-level (Liquidity and LiquidityJS, Liquidity with ReasonML syntax), have been developed with this goal in mind. They have been designed with a formal semantics, a strong type-system to detect bugs during development, and the possibility to use formal verification to prove the correctness of smart contracts.

People may be used, with traditional software, to apply software patches to fix bugs all the time. That’s not the case on a blockchain: because the smart contract code is written in the blockchain, and the blockchain is immutable, smart contract bugs cannot be fixed, once the contract has been deployed. Testing is not enough either, because they are not exhaustive. Only formal verification, proving the absence of bug before deployment, can give enough trust in a smart contract to make it handle assets representing millions of USD. Dune dev team is one of the most talented teams in formal verification.

Ethereum is also used a lot in the context of private networks. Quorum, for example, is a famous variant of Ethereum with extensions to permission the network and allow encrypted transactions between a subset of the nodes in the network. Dune is also going in the direction of permissioned networks: the current version of Dune already implements several mechanisms to permission a private network (both off-chain and on-chain) and to permission the accounts (KYC), and encrypted transactions are expected to be implemented in the next months.

Conclusion

We see Dune Network as a bridge between the Bitcoin community and the world of smart contracts popularized by Ethereum. Dune Network will allow Bitcoin holders to perform green transactions, on a fast Proof-of-Stake network, and benefit from the security/reliability of verifiable smart contracts. Of course, it is an ambitious goal, and we are only half-way on this path, but Dune keeps evolving very fast, so… stay Duned !

Connect with us

Discord: https://discord.gg/JBUGqFg
Telegram: https://t.me/dune_network
Medium: https://medium.com/dune-network
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dune_network
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/dune_network/
Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/dune-network
Website: https://dune.network
Email: contact@dune.network