Be Simple, Be Supportive
This month kicked off quite nicely (and busy)!
During San Francisco blockchain week (check out our video highlights of the eventful week), Nervos hosted a technical discussion focusing on Layer 2 solutions called“The Future of Layer 2” (click to check event photos and video recording on Nervos’ Youtube channel) in Galvanize San Francisco. Moderating the panel was our co-founder, Kevin Wang.
Nervos Chief Architect Jan Xie joined the panel with Arthur Gervais (Liquidity Network’s co-founder), Kelvin Fichter (the Lead Researcher for Plasma Research at OmiseGO), Stan Kladko (CTO & Co-founder of SKALE), Ameen Soleimani (CEO of SpankChain), François-René Rideau (Chief Architect of Alacris), and Mo Dong (Co-founder of Celer Network).
When introducing Nervos to the audience, Jan gave a synopsis of the Nervos Network’s solution to the blockchain trilemma.
“Nervos’ answer to the trilemma is a layered architecture. We want to build a full stack of protocols instead of a single blockchain to solve the problem. We can’t do all the things with a single blockchain, our approach is to make a Layer 1 blockchain focused on security and decentralization, and let the Layer 2 solutions to focus on scalability.”
You might be wondering what we were doing at an event for Layer 2? Well, we are building a new public blockchain platform — Nervos CKB (Common Knowledge Base) that will serve as a Layer 1 optimized for the Layer 2 protocols. Our mission echoes the message Jan went on to deliver: “We need to cooperate and build all this stuff together as a community.”
That being said, here are the highlights of what went on in the community discourse.
Liquidity Network
Arthur Gervais, co-founder of Liquidity Network, an off-chain scaling solution that offers zero-fee transfers and swaps between any tokens on Ethereum said:
“With Liquidity now, you can build your own decentralized exchange, with an off-chain order book and off-chain settlement system. And obviously, this scales much faster and bigger than on-chain settlements.”
Celer Network
Celer Network’s Channel is a generalized state channel which they describe as “a common abstraction on top of different off-chain scalability solutions including side chains and state channels.”
“Our mission here is stated as ‘bring Internet scale to every blockchain,’ so we focus not only on payment acceleration but also to accelerate and channelize all sorts of general applications,” Mo Dong, co-founder of Celer, said in his introduction of the project.
Celer has recently announced their testnet and SDK launch. A few projects are currently testing out the Celer network’s scalability, including an off-chain prediction market, and a micro-payment cloud services.
SKALE Labs
“We are a network that accelerates smart contracts, in particular, Ethereum EVM-based smart contracts,” said Stan Kladko, CTO & Co-founder of SKALE Labs.
Kladko said that they believe that while proof-of-work blockchains like Bitcoin, Nervos, and Ethereum will continue to flourish for the next decades, there will be other types of chains that will rise into existence for other specific purposes, and with different trade-offs.
Alacris
Chief Architect François-René Rideau described Alacris as, “ [a] blockchain layer 2 operating system.”
Alacris has a unique approach to Layer 2 scaling.
“The best Layer 1 scalability solutions right now are state channels and side chains that are Plasma. But both of these solutions require two transactions on the main chain to set up the channel or to exit in emergencies.” Rideau said.
“If you want every human and every human’s 100 machines in the future to be able to partake in the network, you need to be able to scale much further than that,” he continued, “The solution we propose is to have sidechains but unlike the Plasma sidechains that require an exit on the main chain in case trouble happens, we want to prevent the problems that Plasma has which is the block withholding attack.”
Rideau adds that their solution can enable fast transactions and can scale much further than existing blockchains.
OmiseGO / Plasma
Kelvin Fichter is the lead researcher at Omisego that is researching Plasma, a framework for building scalable blockchain applications; Omisego is building a decentralized exchange based on this.
“The way that Plasma popped up, it was sort of an evolution of sidechains,” Fichter explains. Further expounding on sidechains, Fichter pointed out the desire for some flexibility in building consensus rules.
“They were originally designed so that you can make interesting consensus rules and play with things because changing Bitcoin is really, really hard. But if you just make this other Bitcoin that you can change all you want, then you can play with it,” he added.
He explained that although sidechains are a good Layer 2 scaling solution, they are still plagued by a fundamental problem.
“If a sidechain consensus mechanism, for example, stopped publishing blocks, your stuff is just stuck there and you can’t really pull any of your money out,” he said. “Plasma grew out of this as a way to think about ‘how do we solve this?’ How do we make sure that if a whole sidechain dies — how do we make sure that we get our money back.”
Kelvin explained that Plasma is a “sub-blockchain that’s running alongside a main blockchain” that publishes what are essential “state checkpoints” that attest to the validity of a state — unless contradicted by a later state record; this could be used to check balances in case a sidechain “dies.”
SpankChain
SpankChain made quite a name for itself as it is one of the few blockchain projects that focus on the adult entertainment industry — it also has an appropriately named token “$BOOTY.” SpankChain’s payment channel is already live on the Ethereum mainnet and is set to launch their SpankPay SDK, a wallet that would enable merchants to get paid instantly through SpankChain’s payment channels.
In terms of user experience, Soleimani says this would be seamless.
“You click ‘Buy’ and then it’s instant because payment channels are all off-chain and instant. And you can’t beat the UX of ‘instant.’ That’s why we went with payment channels,” Soleimani, the CEO of SpankChain said.
He added that they are also adding ERC20 support, coming as soon as bugs are ironed out. Apart from this, SpankChain is also launching a decentralized exchange, as well as an “algorithmic central bank” called SpankBank to regulate their token.
As a Layer 2 solution, SpankChain focuses on payment channels, but they are exploring state channels as well.
“SpankChain specifically is more focused on payment channels in the short term. But we have done some state channels research and are following the work that Celer, L4, and others are doing,” Soleimani said.
What’s Next
It was a pleasure sharing the stage with all the cool layer2 projects and taking part in addressing issues and questions about the inevitable next phase in blockchain technology. As it happens, some of the issues brought up in the discussion are exactly what Nervos was built to solve!
For those who are building and are interested in building Layer 2 solutions, it’s never too late to learn about different ideas and approaches! We will be co-hosting another Layer 2 tech talk with Celer Network in Prague pre Devcon on Oct29th to support the development of the second layer solutions, by bringing together the most prominent researchers and engineers working on Layer 2 solutions, including Mo Dong from Celer Network, Liam Horn from L4, Georgios Konstantopolous from Loom Network, Kristina Hostáková from Perun, Patrick McCorry from PISA, Lefteris Karapetsas from Raiden Network, Nathan Ginnever from Finality Lab , Arjun Bhuptani from Connext , James Young from SpankChain, Eric Olszewski from Transmute , Guillaume Felley from Liquidity Network , Johann Barbie from Parsec Labs , Daniel Luca and Lucian Boca.
Click here to RSVP. Hope to see some of you in Prague!
For more information on Nervos, visit us at:
Official website: http://nervos.org/
Telegram: https://t.me/nervosnetwork
Twitter: https://twitter.com/nervosnetwork
