NASGO’s Pegged Sidechain Architecture — Solving Scalability
If you’ve followed the scalability debate within crypto, you may have heard of sharding. Sharding is a relatively old database architecture concept first developed in the 90s based around horizontally partitioning parts of a database. A “shard” refers to each individual database partition and its etymology derives, interestingly enough, from a massively multiplayer online role-playing game called Ultima Online, where each server “world” was referred to as a shard.
With regards to database performance, sharding improves database speeds by reducing index size and enables more efficient distribution of the database over a variety of devices. As such, infinite scalability is possible as long as there are enough participating databases in the overall network. Sharding seems like a natural fit for blockchains as blockchains themselves can be thought of as decentralized databases that exist over a multitude of nodes ran by different users. Optimizing scalability is important. Since the CryptoKitties incident, where the Ethereum network was slowed to a crawl due to heightened activity on one DApp, much of blockchain development has centered around building scalable systems.
There are a few difficulties with regards to sharding, however. For one, corruption of one shard can prove disastrous for the overall database as each shard needs to function correctly in order for the network to properly execute its transactions. In addition, blockchain developers may have difficulty modifying the architecture of a sharding-based network as any change must be coordinated across all shards.
The solution that NASGO has adopted for its blockchain is the pegged sidechain architecture. Sidechain architecture is often compared to sharding, but there are some key differences. First introduced by Adam Back in 2014, sidechains are blockchains attached to a parent blockchain. In the case of NASGO, the NASGO mainchain would attach to a sidechain using a two-way peg.
The two-way peg mechanism allows tokens and assets from a blockchain to be used in another blockchain, and then to be moved back to the original blockchain if required. The system is called a “two-way peg” because NSG tokens are temporarily locked on the NASGO mainchain while an equivalent amount of NSG tokens are unlocked in a sidechain. The original mainchain tokens are only unlocked with the tokens existing on the sidechain are locked. This mechanism creates a level of assured trust between the mainchain and sidechain.
In terms of performance, sidechains allow a blockchain platform to optimize its resource management. Each sidechain can house its own database, consensus algorithm, trading mode and account architecture, with low time investment involved. Sidechains are also able to adjust or upgrade their specifications should the requirements change in the future. This decentralizes points of failure, ensuring that the sum of the network’s parts is greater than any single contributor.
In addition, the benefit of each sidechain being independent is that any type of attack or compromise of the sidechain will be limited that specific sidechain. The same applies to the NASGO mainchain; any issue with the mainchain is solely limited to the mainchain.
NASGO sidechains are built to be utilized by any type of user. Users with minimal to no familiarity with coding are still able to create, distribute and manage decentralized applications and secure assets on the NASGO platform by deploying their own sidechain without having to rely on the NASGO mainchain. The flexibility provided by the NASGO sidechain structure, along with its coding-free implementation allows any user, from veteran developer to non-technical users, to leverage the power of blockchain to tokenize their business.
