Hello World, its LUKSO
You have probably read about LUKSO here and there and maybe listen to some of my podcasts, but we were not very public about the project yet. In fact we have been utterly quiet throughout the last year, as we were building and setting up the legal infrastructure, testing the technical basis and building PoC’s that show the power of Blockchain in Fashion and Lifestyle.
So it's time for a blog post, that will be the first of a series of updates that I will bring along the journey. My posts will be usually more about the technical basis, but in this post I will go a little bit into where the idea came from.
The LUKSO project started out with an idea by my partner Marjorie Hernandez in 2017. At the time Marjorie worked at EY building their Berlin Innovation Lab. Here they worked with many clients on Blockchain projects, that got her a good insight in what the Industry at the time was up to in terms of Blockchain. I followed the Blockchain space myself since 2013 and started actively developing at the Ethereum Foundation in January 2015. This gave us a great deal of insights into both worlds — the corporate and the open source space of the Blockchain ecosystem. Through that we realized quickly that real-world use cases on Blockchain are about to happen, but at the same time saw how corporations didn’t know how to realize the full potential of an open decentralized infrastructure, as they were rather opting-in for private permissioned Blockchains.
As the initiator of the ERC-20 token standard and developer of many important projects in the Ethereum space like the Mist Browser, the Ethereum Wallet and web3.js, I thought a lot about how we can get the current world to adopt such a break through technology like Blockchain. As I watched the space evolving it became more and more obvious for me that the future for any industry with Blockchain lies within the launch of their own networks for multiple reasons. I call those networks that are directly started for or by a specific vertical or industry context based Blockchains.
Together with Marjorie’s idea the LUKSO project was born, a public Blockchain specifically launched for the Fashion and Lifestyle industry.
Why a separate network you might ask?
The answer lies in context.
We have seen many alternatives to Bitcoin popping up in 2013, but Ethereum was the first one to bring a new technological context to the Blockchain ecosystem, the one of decentralized applications (DApps), where I was the (first ever) Lead Dapp Developer. Today we see many new forms of smart contract Blockchains competing with Ethereum and while offering alterations in consensus and architecture, are mostly built around the core innovation from Ethereum, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
While this technological experimentation and competition is important, it brings little concrete steps to current industries and businesses, as they explore their path to a future with Blockchain.
“If you want to bring Blockchain to an Industry, let them start their own.”
This is where LUKSO comes in. Instead of tinkering with private chains (which are surely useful for internal book-keeping and tracking), LUKSO creates a trusted ecosystem for all participants of the Fashion and Lifestyle industry to build, explore and experiment with use cases that are innovative and useful for this industry and require a trust-less middle man.
A public Blockchain allows for anybody to trust its infrastructure and rules, as they are able to run and verify the network. Making it in return ideal for use cases that carry real world value. From monetary value like payments, and custom tokens, to ownership of digital twins and direct communication channels between creators and user of items in the industry.
The network
Creating a separate network also allows for real-world use cases with a large number of available resources, that current public networks can not offer, due to their high demand from all sectors and industries.
Layer two solutions and new architectures like sharding will help improve that scalability, but even with an increase of 1000x in transactions per second it will not suffice for the whole world to run on one single Blockchain any time soon.
Therefore we need separate Blockchains, not only for scalability reasons but for reasons of affiliation, the feeling of belonging — the context.
LUKSO is initially built on the great work done by the folks at PoA.network, which is an EVM based Proof of Authority network. In fact, its Tech Lead Igor Barinov is in LUKSO’s advisory board, as well as Péter Szilágyi the Lead Core Developer of geth, the Ethereum Foundations main network client.
The first iteration of the network will have on-chain governance that will be based on staking and voting of validators in a pool, where we will transition to dPoS in the mid-term. When Casper research solidifies, we plan to transition to a Casper based network that allows sharding, as will the main Ethereum network at that time. The initial LUKSO network will allow for 3–8M transaction per day, or ±100 tx/s, that is enough to run a lot of applications core smart contracts in production. When validator nodes beef up their machines, this number can be increased to 500 tx/s. Sharding will then increase that (not equally) by 1000x.
By using an EVM based Blockchain basis all tools build for the Ethereum ecosystem, as well as all knowledge and tutorials apply equally for the LUKSO Blockchain. This allows for an easy transition of any project from the Ethereum mainnet to the LUKSO Blockchain, if the Fashion and Lifestyle context is a better fit.
DApps
The LUKSO Blockchain allows decentralized applications to deploy and run smart contracts that enable and govern value transfer. This allows for a whole new kind of applications in the fashion and lifestyle industry. Tokens beeing an obvious one. This enables from payments, to dicscounts, to Non-Fungible-Tokens (NFTs) like tickets, rewards and earn-able status.
Setting standards
LUKSO is not only a Blockchain infrastructure but also an incubator for projects, ideas, and standards. We have seen over the last years, and especially 2017 with ERC-20 tokens, how a standard can create a whole new industry and disrupt and revolutionize processes like crowdfunding! Other standards like Fabian’s ERC-725 is just being discussed and it already formed an alliance, and might be the next standard to hugely impact the Blockchain space.
The same innovation is direly needed in the Fashion industry, to set standards for digital twins, to verify the origin and ownership of all current and coming items. With standards, an explosion of synergies is created that — on a Blockchain — can move fashion forward to its new digital life!
But thats not all, LUKSO is the base layer for the social web 3.0. Its for the influencers, the instagramers, the Brands, the communities and creatives of this world! Blockchain allows to form verifiable communities and give those communities real value. Thats what LUKSO is meant for, and we look forward to Blockchainify the social web!
