Muon Ecosystem Outlook for 2024: Chain-Independent VRF, Cross-Chain Token Standard, & Combo Contracts

Presenting Pion’s Innovative Protocols and Core Developments

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Muon

3 min readFeb 19, 2024

The Muon team spent many months developing Pion network, a chain-independent and stateless DON (Decentralized Oracle Network) designed to handle complex operations that smart contracts traditionally struggle with. Having successfully laid this foundation, we are shifting our focus to promoting the network’s unique use-cases and forming partnerships. Read on to see an outlook of what we have planned for 2024.

Pion Protocols

Chain-Independent Randomness (VRF Protocol)

The utilization of random numbers in web3 spans a spectrum of applications, which have made them virtually indispensable. But producing truly random numbers — both verifiable and unpredictable — is still a challenge and most Random Number Generators (RNGs) currently in use just provide Pseudo-random numbers.

Pion’s Verifiable Random Function (VRF) generated by its TSS network has overcome this challenge by producing truly random numbers that are multichain, supporting both EVM and non-EVM networks, and offer a cheaper and faster alternative to others.

We are going to announce Pion’s integration with a project already leveraging our VRF technology next week.

(Edit: The partner mentioned here is DeRand and its integration with Pion was announced on Feb 21. See our Medium article.)

Cross-Chain Token Standard (ERC404-m)

The launch of Pandora using ERC-404, the new experimental token standard, has stirred up a wave of excitement and on-going discussion.

ERC-404m is an innovative upgrade by the Muon team that makes ERC-404 multi-chain. That means tokens created with this standard can be transferred between different chains in real-time (depending on each chain’s finality).

See our Medium article for details.

Off-Chain & On-Chain Connecter

Smart contracts as we know them today are fully executed on the blockchain network. There are, however, complex calculations and processes that need to be decentralized — but not on-chain. It is either not possible or economically feasible for smart contracts to perform these.

Muon presents an innovative type of smart contract called Combo Contracts that execute these complex operations off-chain. Removing these complex parts from a dApp’s smart contract and encapsulating them in a Muon app greatly simplifies the development of a smart contract on the dApp’s side. It can also allow for the creation of sophisticated contracts that can adapt to changing conditions and requirements.

This is a major use-case for Pion network and a partner is developing a platform leveraging this protocol. Stay tuned for more updates.

In addition to the above-mentioned new partnerships, some of our current partners — BrightID, Symmio, Fear and DiBs — have been building new apps on Pion to decentralize and secure their node operations or track data for incentives. More details to come in the next few weeks.

Core Updates

Despite the shift in our main focus, development on the core will go on. Here are a few

Frost Version of TSS Implementation: A faster and more efficient version of our TSS has been developed using Frost, a high-level, general-purpose multiparadigm programming language, and is currently being tested.
Making app deployment permissionless: Currently projects building on Muon need to register their apps. A mid-2024 development is making this process permissionless.
Multi-chaining the fee structure: Another development planned for mid-2024 is making it possible for apps to pay their fees on different chains.
Optimistic Network: This is the last layer in Muon’s multi-layer security architecture. Its MVP is ready and is planned to be completed in late 2024.

Stay tuned for news of our new partnerships.

Pion is Muon ecosystem’s Canary and first mainnet. It is a chain-independent and stateless DON (Decentralized Oracle Network) that enables dApps to make their off-chain components decentralized. By incorporating Pion (by Muon), the manner in which decentralized applications store, process, and access data will be fundamentally transformed.

Run a Pion node.