What’s Nebulas?
Nebulas is a next generation public blockchain, aiming for a continuously improving ecosystem.
Why Nebulas? What makes Nebulas different?
I think Nebulas describes a new blockchain world with three key features:
- Value Ranking: Nebulas Rank (NR) provides a measure of value for every unit in the blockchain.
- Self-evolving: Nebulas Force (NF) enables Nebulas to respond to new demands without forks.
- Native Incentive: Nebulas Incentive (NI) rewards developers and virtuous users who devotes.
I view Nebulas as a living blockchain. It’s just like a little boy; observing this novel world with his sparkling eyes (NR), showing his lovely smile to people who care for him (NI) and growing up surrounded by tender loving care everyday (NF).
The new world is coming!
Current State
All efforts are channeled into building the new world described by Nebulas.
From the beginning, Nebulas is fully open source on Github: https://github.com/nebulasio/go-nebulas.
There are three main branches:
- master: the stable branch used for mainnet.
- testnet: the stable branch used for testnet.
- develop: the unstable branch used for development.
We just released the Go-Nebulas v1.0.0, called “Eagle Nebula”, on master branch. In this milestone version, we focus on basic features offered by Ethereum. However, we offer the following differences:
- Javascript is chosen as our first smart contract language. Javascript is the most commonly used programming language in today’s context. I believe this choice will make a big difference for Nebulas.
- Protocol Buffers is chosen as our general data serialization solution. Protobuf is an awesome solution that I think everybody should use it.
- RocksDB is chosen as our persistent database. Our test result shows RocksDB has better I/O performance than LevelDB.
- We design chunk-based synchronization mechanism. In this way, we can reduce the count of network packets and maintain high safety.
- We design Parallel Execution Model (PEM) to execute transactions in a block parallely to improve TPS.
- We design specific address encoding/decoding. Addresses in Nebulas will start with the letter ’n’ which represents ‘Nebulas’. Type information is also encoded in the addresses so that we can directly identify whether if an address is a smart contract address or not.
‘Eagle Nebula’ has an extraordinary meaning for us. Nebulas launched Mainnet 1.0 with this version. Nebulas is ALIVE!
What’s Next?
NR, NF, NI are all under research and verification now.
A new world is upon us.
