The Enecuum team has made a long journey since 2017. It started from revolutionary ideas of freigeld tokenomics, 1 000 000 TPS with zero fees and Petri net as a smart contract creation interface. It went to revolutionary solutions of Trinity protocol (PoS, PoW, PoA), tradable testnet token, mobile nodes, on-chain referral system, ID-based cryptography, mining tokens with a 2.5 year old mainnet. We made our own DEX and a couple of cross-chain bridges. We created a Uniswap v3 liquidity manager and JIT liquidity bot. We studied algorithmic stable coins and ZK-protocols.
We were searching for the perfect utility for the Enecuum network. We wanted to create a network that will help people to stand for their freedom: freedom of ownership as Bitcoin’s main message, freedom of opportunity as Ethereum virtual machine provides, freedom from censorship as… oh, maybe Enecuum will stand here as an example? We went a long way and we are ready to answer. We call it Trinity 2.0 and we want to share our vision on the perfect utility.
Let’s begin with the problem the industry is facing. All blockchains that are popular today were created before the MEV* problem became pronounced. It means there were no efforts made into the protection from different ways to manipulate transaction order in blocks or even censor transactions. And time showed how it may affect various ecosystem aspects. According to Flashbots $687,201,904 were extracted as MEV only from main Ethereum DeFi protocols, although Flashbot’s MEV-Boost solution, designed to reduce this number, is being criticised as a citadel of censorship (60% of all Ethereum 2.0 blocks with enforced OFAC compliance according to Labrys). Uniswap consider their price oracles less secure because of increased MEV potential from the PoS nature of Ethereum 2.0. Optimistic roll-ups developers seek for improved MEV handling to implement fair decentralised sequencers (Arbitrum and Optimism). And even Ethereum by itself is in the search for MEV-protected PoS voting system randomness as it blocks increasing its TPS without sacrificing decentralisation. We look at all these problems as tightly connected with the same cause from unspecified transaction pending and block order handling.
*MEV stands here for any possible way a miner (or other network participant) can make profit aside from the ways stated in the network protocol. For example, Bitcoin whitepaper supposes that miners receive transaction fees for including transactions in blocks, but it does not forbid miners to receive off-chain fees for not including certain transactions (hypothetical censorship auction). In Ethereum there are more ways for miners to affect the network (and sell this as a service), because of its complex smart contracts nature.
Secondly, let’s remember our strongest research skills. It is cryptography and scientific approach. Maybe Enecuum does not have the biggest dev team to code blockchain faster than other projects, but definitely we are competitive in cutting-edge cryptography. Indeed, Trinity protocol basis was published in proceedings of IEEE Conference on Business Informatics. ID-based cryptography we used required a lot of work never done before. Like finding suitable extension field and elliptic curve for pairing-based crypto primitives or implementing these crypto primitives on Android OS.
Finally, combining the mentioned above, blockchain problems and Enecuum strong skills, we came to the idea of a new network protocol, Trinity 2.0. It should have a carefully crafted approach to block creation, focusing censorship resistance and transaction order fairness. It should have the ultimate transaction pending privacy. So many “private tx pools” in Ethereum, how do they guarantee or responsible for that “privacy”? Or even given a public pool. Most of the blockchain users are dependent on so-called “node RPC providers” like Infura is a provider for MetaMask wallet. Centralised service definitely not interested in messing with your transactions. Even hardware wallets. Ledger Live does not work without internet access and Ledger services online. It is completely safe. Do you remember Satoshi? Each wallet must be a full node to validate all transactions and know all account balances by itself. Here come Enecuum mobile nodes. First Trinity iteration made great progress towards trustless wallet behaviour without having a full node disk and computation power requirements. And it would be very handy to be able to send your transaction directly to the miners bypassing any too public or too private pools. Do you remember about perfect utility? Oh yes, PoA nodes will shine in Trinity 2.0. But it is not the end. Speaking of randomness, electrons, lotteries and pay-to-earn games. The best way to achieve fair results is to have several parties with competing economic interests. And PoA provides real people that may take part in elections or securing randomness with enough “logistic” (algorithmic, network, technical) and economical support. Yes, PoS and PoW still have a great impact on the system, that is why we came to a completely new “mining” algorithm. It is not Bitcoin-like PoW, more like a brute-force password cracking PoW with a bit of verifiably delay functions flavour for PoS control. We still have a lot of work to do to make economical balance as well as time frames tuning (not so fast to be available only for expansive hardware, not so slow to be uninteresting for dApp developers). Speaking of dApps, we spent so much time around smart contract development. And we need to admit EVM is still the way to do it. We have our own vision on smart contracts but it requires an enormous amount of work to implement. Maybe it will be the next big thing for us, but for now Trinity 2.0 should be EVM-compatible to open mass adoption and to save development time. And the best way to be EMV-compatible is to be an Ethereum fork. Yes, we think, that bringing Trinity consensus to an Ethereum-like network will be easier and more robust than vice versa. We want Trinity 2.0 to be mature and battle-hardened. Current Enecuum network definitely has seen enough, but not as much as Ethereum did. But remember that Vitalik wants mobile nodes in Ethereum, we will be glad to collaborate on this. So we think that Trinity 2.0 randomness, privacy and mobility approach could unleash the full potential of EVM and existing dApps.
We see so many blockchain services based on trust in a single party, it’s not even funny. Looks like blockchain does not save people from eager to give their money to the Fox and the Cat in the Field of Miracles. We all know that such moves have bad endings. But it is not a point to give up. Every step counts. So before MEV auctions and oracle-based randomness providers become synonymous with a shadow economy and fraud, let’s create a new hope for free money together.