Introducing Project 8: A Framework for Building Token-Incentivized Sidechains
We want to help developers build decentralized applications.
Because we know that building on blockchain isn’t easy. Rootchains like Ethereum are transactionally slow. They aren’t private. And you have to learn difficult coding languages like Solidity to build on top of them.
Which is why we’re thrilled to release our first version of Project 8 for public review, an open-source developmental framework for building token-incentivized, Plasma sidechains.
That’s a lot of words to simply say we allow developers to easily build their own sidechain applications.
Sidechains are the blockchain industry’s answer to the native limitations of the rootchains. Sidechains are separate blockchains that promise enhanced capabilities, but are still anchored to a parent root chain for security and enforcement.
Sidechains can process information faster than root chains, cost less money to operate, and can be privatized if needed.
Project 8 is built to give developers a “sidechain-in-a-box” level of accessibility so developers can focus on what matters most: building product. Project 8 allows developers to use any language and application stack, making it easy to turn any application into a decentralized application.
A Trusted, Battle-Tested Framework
Devs can trust in Project 8 because it’s already been used to build real, in-market product.
Project 8 is what Lucidity uses to build our own blockchain advertising solutions. As recently featured in AdAge, Lucidity’s decentralized analytics solution was shown to provide a 21% lift in campaign performance for Toyota, even after traditional solution optimizations had already been applied.
And now we’ve open-sourced that framework for public review.
The Project 8 Difference
Sidechains alone offer the promise of building decentralized applications that actually solve real-world business challenges. But we’ve implemented two other techniques that make sidechains even more powerful:
- Plasma Bank
- Tokenization
Plasma is a set of techniques to build sidechains that are safe via mass exits. Project 8 uses Plasma Bank, the simplest implementation of Plasma that enables decentralized token payments within a given sidechain application. Plasma Bank relies on the correct, incentivized consensus of that sidechain.
The Project 8 framework is designed to support other versions of Plasma as well, including Plasma Cash and Plasma MVP. These implementations will be connected to future public releases of the Project 8 framework.
The second benefit of the Project 8 framework is its ability to create token-incentivized sidechains.
Token-incentivized sidechains use economic incentives to ensure every consensus state is accurate. Node operators stake tokens to vote and verify that the current state of the sidechain is correct.
If the node operator is in agreement with the winning majority, they receive a portion of the fees. If the node operator isn’t in agreement with the winning majority, they lose a percentage of the tokens they staked.
In short, token-incentivized sidechains reward system users for good performance and penalize any form of dishonesty or manipulation.
Build What You Want
At the end of the day, Project 8 was developed to give developers the flexibility to build an endless array of decentralized applications without worrying about the things that typically slow them down.
Imagine a decentralized video game, an automated payment system, or even a social network.
The possibilities are endless.
Originally published at lucidity.tech on October 25, 2018.
