A Blockchain For Collaboration

It has been a little over 3 months since we announced Ellcrys on Hacker News. Since then we have gotten a lot of feedback that has helped to shape the idea and how we communicate it from one that isn’t immediately clear to one that makes more sense and is much more relatable. In this article, I am going to write about:

1. What Ellcrys was 3 months ago.
2. What has changed.
3. What is important to Ellcrys.
4. What is next.
5. How you can help.

1. What Ellcrys was 3 Months Ago

This was our previous one liner:

Build Fast, Scalable & Safer Smart Contract Applications on Existing Technologies.

What this meant was that, users would be able to build “smart contract” applications that didn’t run on a blockchain but on an isolated, kubernetes/nomad-backed platform with functionalities determined by a protocol. This protocol would ensure “smart contracts” are isolated and didn’t do anything that they were not permitted to do like accessing external services, mutating state and providing service to external agents.

“Smart contracts” on this platform will be built using existing languages and accessed via browsers or REST API endpoints. These kind of smart contracts would also enjoy the benefits of centrally run apps (speed & scalability). Some people made the case that these apps cannot be described as smart contract (according to Nick Szabo) because they needed to be executed by a trusted party and as such Ellcrys can’t be described as a smart contract platform. Instead, it is a polyglot application platform like Heroku with a protocol that provides isolation, ACLs and other predefined rules and functions.

While I believe a blockchain isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for running a smart contract (notice I didn’t use the phrase ‘decentralized smart contract’), We understand platforms like Ethereum have standardised the meaning, technical characteristics and expectations of a smart contract application and platform.

2. What has changed?

After a lot of consultations, We are now building a blockchain network that will allow people to collaborate around a Git repository that may include codes interpreted and loaded as a smart contract or deployed to a centralized polyglot host provider (AWS, Heroku etc).

Ellcrys at its core, is a decentralized version control system based on Git, that bundles up git objects into immutable blocks allowing users to create censorship resistant, highly available repositories. Users will be able to create decentralized apps (smart contracts) or centrally hosted applications deployed from the network.

This kind of application/organization is called Community Contract.

3. What is important to Ellcrys?

Short answer — Open Source Software & Contributors.

Ellcrys aims to be the platform that allows people (engineers/developers, designers, testers etc) come together to build open, multi-owner projects together. Projects/Apps that are openly governed and may even generate revenue. These projects can be libraries, websites, frameworks, desktop or mobile apps, smart contracts etc. Key characteristics of an Ellcrys project are:

Open Source: Apps on Ellcrys will exist in a Git repository for anyone to view, contribute to or fork. Contributors to projects will be natively compensated with coins by the network. Open source maintainers will be able to monetise their projects by creating/distributing paid branches. This kind of branch attracts fees when fetched by users. Paid branches may be configured to become free after a period. Project owners can also accept paid issues from users.

Open Governance: A project by default is governed openly such that contributors and stakeholders participate in governance making sure nothing happens without majority agreement. Ellcrys will provide tools to allow custom governance models.

Decentrally Built, Centrally Deployed Apps: A decentrally built software is one that has been built by people across the world through contributions to an Ellcrys decentralized repository (a.k.a dRepo). A centrally deployed app is a dRepo that can be anonymously deployed to a centralized, off-chain hosting platform. This host platform deploys the project and makes it accessible through a public gateway. These kind of apps have access to any additional services provided by the hosting platform. Ellcrys will provide a standard protocol to be implemented by any hosting company interested in deploying decentralized repositories.

Smart Contracts: Decentralized repositories can also include branches containing smart contract codes that are compiled, deployed and used to process transactions addressed to the repository. To make it simpler for developers to start developing smart contracts, we will support modern languages like JavaScript, Go, Ruby and Python. To reduce non-deterministic code authoring, these languages will be limited in features.

4. What is next?

Fundraising (Pre-Token, Token Sale): A project of this magnitude requires significant amount of funds to cover hiring, research, administration, legal and marketing cost. We will be launching our contribution web app in a few weeks in preparation for our token pre-sale where we will sell 500,000,000 (500 million) tokens (of 2 billion) to the public. The pre-sale event will take place on January 27th, 2018. In the third quarter of 2018, after the launch of the test network (Gendry) we will hold the token sale event. More information on how to participate will be available soon.

Development: Over the next 6–8 months we will be working full-time to research, develop and launch the test network. Shortly after, the main network will be launched. We will also be working on a Heroku-like platform for hosting centralized applications.

5. How can you help?

If you find Ellcrys interesting and would like to see it in production next year, you can contribute in the following ways:

1. Participate in our fundraising campaign.
2. Join us as a software engineer.
3. Become an advisor.

Please reach out to us: hello[at]ellcrys.co