The Reemergence of Purpose-Built Blockchains

The trend of building general-purpose blockchain protocols for the entire world to use is proving to be very problematic. These systems become bloated because they are attempting to “boil the ocean”. The entire blockchain space is full of project teams using forks of popular protocols. However, some of the projects forked are more complexed than others. From my perspective, when I see a team fork a protocol, the way they are using it for their use case requires far less programmatic features than that of which the protocol developers originally built.

Purposeful Simplicity

Although it required competent computer science skills to engineer, Bitcoin was purposefully simple.

This simplicity was seen as a weakness, and led to teams attempting to make a bitcoin-like system, that could compute anything — but they got it wrong in my opinion.

Instead of building a blockchain designed to execute any type of transaction logic, the focus should have been on building systems designed to accept design specifications as input, and output a dedicated, purpose-built protocol focused on the use case for which it was constructed.

When developers said they want to build a better bitcoin, the attempt to make a general purpose chain has led to us getting further away from bitcoin-like ideas. This is usually why Bitcoin maximalists sometimes refer to Ethereum as a “science experiment” — not in a good way of course. I personally love all that Ethereum has done, but I understand this sentiment as well.

Transaction Execution

Once again, bitcoin was designed to be simple, and to execute transactions a specific way — a deterministic virtual machine free from the infinitely-sized set of computing problems already known when chasing turing completeness.

Just like you can compute an infinite amount of computations, turing completeness also introduces an infinite amount of ways to introduce bugs into your system

Transaction execution logic should have never been designed to be turing complete. Turing completeness should be a goal of the system used to design the protocol itself. This ensures being able to create any system you can think of, but also ensures the final protocol is restricted to the purpose for which it is designed.

We already know there will not be one decentralized protocol in the world, so why try to make a single protocol designed to execute everything under the sun?

The goal should be systems that can output dedicated cryptoeconomic network protocols based on the use case it is given.

Thought-leaders in the blockchain space speak on the uses for general purpose chains for experimentation. However, when developing something more than a POC, using a dedicated protocol for your use case is best. This means you can prototype your “decentralized Netflix” idea on Ethereum as a set of smart contracts, but when it comes time for you to deploy your production ready product, smart contracts won’t cut it.

Our Experimentation

This is why we developed our protocols at kunta.io

Our first experimental protocol, v1, is designed to be customized via a chain configuration file

Once the network is started, the chain is stored in the chain’s genesis block. The protocol then follows the configuration from the genesis block for its lifetime. We also built tools to update the chain’s configuration.

The tooling built around our first generation protocol enable rapid experimentation and development of decentralized protocols.

Our second protocol, aos.kunta.io is designed to do the same thing, in a more secure way. Instead of abstracting configuration details into something external, the code is structured in a way to facilitate customization via targeted abstraction functions. Also with v1, we created a Native Abstraction Language (NAL) for use in designing a chain’s functionality. In AOS, we rely on the language in which the code is written, Rust, instead of a proprietary language.

All of our work aims to provide a developer community fostered around innovation, rapid experimentation, and rapid deployment.

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