FST Network — Relay Network Demo Result Release

FST Network
FST Network
Published in
6 min readApr 23, 2019

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In FST Network ( Previously FundersToken ), we pride ourselves as the bridge to connect businesses to the Blockchain space, removing the technical know-hows and the need of hiring an in-house Blockchain Developer to build Blockchain Applications.

It’s no secret that Blockchain technology is one of the most revolutionary innovations of our lifetime. The potential rooted in Blockchain in terms of the number of industries it can disrupt and all of the problems it can solve is enormous.

However, with all that potential, not that many businesses are adopting Blockchain, most of the huge names that we have been hearing are still experiment with it.

Why?

Because, unlike Machine Learning, AI or even IOT, Blockchain is still very limited and immature for most businesses to build usable and meaningful applications on it.

The most serious hindrance for most businesses to adopt Blockchain

is actually the limitations of the Blockchain environment itself.

Low Scalability, High Gas Fee and the need of a Native Token.

While we have optimized smart contracts, the process of creating smart contracts, tokenization and even enable cross-chain transactions between 2 chains, optimizing the environment of a protocol is something we are not able to do ( at least in a direct manner ).

Well, that changed when we had the idea of “Relay Network”.

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Back in April 2017, back when we were FundersToken, we had a client who aims to bring live time auction to the Blockchain, for the sake of privacy, let’s call them “ 3x ”. “ 3x ” is an auction company that is based in Taiwan, with an average revenue of 100 Million NTD per month.

With security being their first concern, they have chosen to use the Ethereum Blockchain as the platform to build their auction platform on.

“ 3x ” wanted to utilize the power of tokens to tokenize intangible assets and smart contract to ensure settlement of said asset. However, As you can imagine, the number of actions and transaction during every auction is very very high, as every bid will be recorded on the blockchain to ensure transparency.

Though “ 3x ” ’s intention is good, the cost to execute their vision is very very high.

1 ) Ethereum is unable to handle high frequency transactions in a short period of time

2 ) Each transaction requires their end-users to use “Ether” as gas.

3 ) The token transaction fee is too damn high.

It made 0 sense for “ 3x ” to make sure there are “ Ether “ in their clients’ wallets, let alone reimburse them Ethers should they fail to win the bid.

“ 3x ” isn’t the only company that is challenged by these limitations of Ethereum and these limitations aren’t limited to Ethereum only.

Of course, some of the issues can be solved via state channels, but that’d mean sacrificing security as it’s much more prone to attacks.

To enable “ 3x ” ’s vision, we’d have to solve the following issues on hand.

How can we increase the throughput/operation capacity without going off-chain? How can we decrease the gas fee required to make a token transfer? How can we eliminate the need for a native token for tokens to operate on a protocol?

And that got our CTO, Noel, and CIO, Atkins thinking,

“what if we can simulate a second chain on top of the protocol itself, creating a double-layer mining environment?”

Those “ miners ” will function as agent to collect and compact token transfers and broadcast the transaction. They will take a small charge of the tokens that they are collecting and help them to pay Ether gas when broadcasting the transaction.

This sounds good in theory and we weren’t sure it could work, but we took the pioneer’s risk, we started the process of building our concept of a combination of Smart Contracts and a Miner Program, and during December we decided to give it a test.

Here are our results.

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In our testing scenario, we have created a program to generate 600 token transfer requests and these requests will be sent to our Relay Network’s Mining Program.

**Diagram 1 : Token Transfer Requests sent to Mining Program

The Mining Program will then execute a “ dry run ” to ensure the token transfer requests can execute on-chain and, at the same time calculate the gas needed for said token transfer request then and only then it will be collected and compacted by the Relayers then sent to the Ethereum Blockchain as a transaction to be validated by the miners on the Ethereum Blockchain.

We assigned 4 Relayers in this experiment.

Relayer 1 Relayer 2 Relayer 3 Relayer 4

In general, the relayers would need to compete with / outbid each other to relay the token transfers but in this case, we have enough requests for all of them.

Relayers begin to receive token transfer requests from the mining program.

Relayers 1, 2,3, and 4 have collectively compacted 600 token transfer requests into 5 transactions and have broadcasted the transactions to Ethereum. The transactions will be verified by the miners of the Ethereum Blockchain.

Transaction 1 Transaction 2 Transaction 3 Transaction 4 Transaction 5

As shown in transaction 1, a total of 356 token transfers ( 178 token transfers + 178 token transfer rewards to Relayer ) is packaged in one single transaction.

Without Relay Network, 1 token transfer would mean 1 transaction. The cost of token transfers will be shared among those 178 individuals who initiated the token transfer request.

The total gas used with the help of Relay Network for 356 token transfers is 7,110,580. In the traditional method, the gas needed for 356 token transfers is 16,020,000 , meaning that we have reduced the cost of a token transfer by more than 50 %

The throughput/operation capacity in this scenario ( safe maximum capacity ) increased by 1780 times ( 356*5 )

On the Ethereum Blockchain, for a block to reach finality would at least need 6 block confirmations, the Ethereum Officials suggested 12 block confirmations. Because before the generation of the 6th block, the 1st block and the 5th block are most prone to become a canonical chain.

Between block confirmation and mining pool, there would be 5 huge transactions ( Filled with token transfer request ) that will fully fill 5 blocks that are nearly verified, hence for end-users, the time needed for the confirmation of said token transfer request would decrease 1780 times.

To conclude, with Relay Network, we have successfully solved the following

Low Throughput / Operation Capacity of Blockchain Protocols => Increased by 1780x

The need of using a Native Token in the protocol => Relayers get rewards in the form of the token they relay.

High Gas Fee / Transaction Fee => Transaction fee is shared among token transferrer

In addition, our Relay Network is also compatible with other layers 2 / state channel solutions ( Plasma, Raiden, Celer ), meaning we can further optimize and increase the performance of the Blockchain Protocol we are attached to.

We are proud of what our tech team has done and has contributed to the space, from enabling cross-chain transaction between 2 chains to refining and optimizing ERC20 with our ERC1376 and with Relay Network, we are confident that we have created a better ecosystem for our clients to build a blockchain application that will benefit not only the business but their client as well.

Want us to implant our modules on your blockchain protocol?

FST Network Website : fst.network
Send us a mail at admin@fstk.io
Partnership / Investment Enquiry : darren@fstk.io

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FST Network
FST Network

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