Nervos Quarterly Letter: Updates & Highlights from Q2
We’re pleased to announce our first-ever Nervos Quarterly Letter — a compilation of updates to the Nervos ecosystem, as well as events and other highlights that took place during Q2. Because this is the first of many more to come, we’ve also touched on the progress we’ve made since the launch of our mainnet, Lina, last year.
The full report is available at nervos.org/reports/, but the following updates offer an overview of major improvements and community events.
While development and improvements for the layer 1 CKB have continued in 2020, a lot of our focus has shifted to the next phase for Nervos — building a thriving ecosystem. We’re concentrating our efforts in two key areas: developer experience and layer 2 protocols. To ensure we meet our goals, we set up new teams and continued building throughout Q1 and Q2. We are right on track and making some great progress as we enter Q3.
Nervos by the numbers
Timeline and roadmap
In 2019, we reached multiple milestones — the most significant being the community-led launch of CKB mainnet Lina, built from the ground up and delivered as planned. While delivering a fully functional layer 1 blockchain is a significant step toward our goal — a decentralized economy running on top of a trustless, PoW blockchain via a suite of layer 2 protocols — we have a lot of work ahead in 2020 and beyond.
While by no means an exhaustive list, we believe these key areas of focus are fundamental to achieving our long term goals:
Development
As we continue to improve the CKB protocol and on-chain development, our focus in 2020 will be in two off-chain areas: developer experience and layer 2. The core team will keep improving the developer experience, providing more programming language options for smart contracts, more powerful RPCs, more mature SDKs, and better documentation.
What we’re working on:
Muta Framework
Enabling anyone in the world to launch their own blockchain platform while leveraging the security and finality of CKB
User Defined Token (UDT) Standards
Creating the foundation for user designed tokens on CKB — enabling a radically new asset creation platform where every token is a first class asset
Neuron Wallet
Allowing anyone to access the full features of the Nervos network, including a suite of multi-asset functionality and customization
Multilingual Smart Contract
Programming and writing smart contracts in a variety of languages
CKB-VM Optimization
Making the Virtual Machine as high performance and flexible as possible to improve user experience and unlock potential use cases
CKB Explorer
Tapping into every aspect of the Nervos Network to leverage the power of data and analytics
Light Client Protocol
Enabling self verification for mobile wallets, websites and more, without relying on a third party
Research
Layer 2 is an active area of research and development, and we’re going to explore three directions in 2020: channels, chain-based protocols, and zkp-based protocols. We’re actively participating in zero-knowledge proof research and working on prototypes of channels and zkp-based protocols.
What we’re working on:
Zero Knowledge Proofs
Enabling privacy-preserving protocols for the Nervos Network
Post-Quantum Signatures
Preparing for a post quantum world and making sure Nervos to lead the way
Advanced Digital Signatures
Providing multi-party custody, functionality, privacy preservation and more
Consensus Algorithm
Demonstrating the benefits and advantages of our innovative and iterative consensus algorithm — NC-Max
Developer community
We’ll spend a large portion of 2020 and the resources we have to continue to grow our developer community. The success of the Nervos Network is going to largely depend on developers that experiment and build on top of the platform.
Grants Program
Facilitating and empowering developers around the world to contribute to the growth of the Nervos Network
Regional Community Lead Program
Tapping into the key blockchain hubs and ecosystems around the world
Documentation
Making on-boarding into the Nervos Ecosystem as easy as possible
Technical updates
Layer 2 strategy
Layer 2 offers an open and broad research area. There are so many protocols, directions and possibilities with layer 2 technology.
Community Involvement
The core team and community will work in unison on layer 2.
Infrastructure Operation
The core team and community developers are building the infrastructure togethe and giving it to the community. From there, the community can run and operate these layer 2 protocols.
Financial Opportunities
Since we are building the infrastructure and giving it away for free, anyone can run this software and participate in the ecosystem and even potentially make a living from it.
Muta Sidechain
The Muta sidechain is making very good progress, and we are working on it’s stability and security right now.
New Projects
Huobi Finance Chain and Axon are both based on Muta. We also recently approved a grant for LeapDAO, another sidechain project.
Payment Channel Networks
We are prototyping GPC (general payment channels). We are also collaborating with several channel network teams across the blockchain industry and running a series of seminars on building payment channels featuring many of the top researchers in the space.
Blockchain Interoperability
We are working on bridges between Nervos and Bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchain protocols, as well as interoperability between instances of Axon, where any of these deployments could interact and interop with each other.
MAKE Team and Gadgets Workshop
Gadgets Workshop (GW) is a virtual team consisting of engineers, marketing, and business development people from the Foundation and enthusiasts from the community. The key mission of GW is to explore the potentials of Nervos CKB and show how its flexible and powerful design could be used to add more user scenarios to the blockchain world.
Hybrid application team
GW has created an idea pool to collect creative thoughts from various sources.
Community choice
Every two weeks, GW will hold an open brainstorming meeting to talk about an idea with the community. The community will choose some feasible ideas from the ide pool, then the engineers from the Foundation will finish the implementation.
Project selection standards
The GW only produces prototypes that demonstrate original ideas. Production ready applications are not the objective of GW.
New developer tools
Polyjuice
An Ethereum-compatible layer on top of Nervos CKB that offers developers flexibility so they can use the account model in countless ways
Lumos
A full featured JavaScript/TypeScript based dApp framework aiming to simplify the process of building apps on CKB
Capsule
A development framework for creating smart contract scripts in Rust for CKB
For more details on Capsule, Lumos, and Polyjuice, read our blog.
Ecosystem development
Grants Program
100+ total applications, 30 teams considered, 10 grant projects approved and over 1.5M USD grants have been awarded since launch.
Nervos recently announced the members of our first-ever CKLabs cohort. Read more about Portal Wallet and Tocial in our recent blog post.
Major partnerships
Huobi
Huobi has partnered with Nervos to create Huobi Finance Chain (HFC), aregulator-friendly, high-performance financial blockchain that allows enterprises, financial institutions, and exchanges to deploy their own blockchains, tokenized assets, and DeFi services
HFC was open sourced in Q3 2019, the testnet launched in Q1 2020, and the mainnet will launch in Q3/Q4 2020. Read more about our partnership with Huobi on our blog.
Cryptape
Cryptape is the development company of Nervos and will provide engineering and research services. Cryptape solves the cold start problem by providing Nervos industry clients, a community of core blockchain developers (e.g. IOHK / Cardano), financial use cases and access to many enterprise customers
China Merchants Bank International (CMBI)
China Merchants Bank International (CMBI) is a strategic partner of Nervos and a long-time customer of Cryptape. CMBI provides Nervos federal-level legitimacy and also financial use cases and access to many enterprise customers. Read more about our partnership with CMBI on our blog.
Blockchain Service Network (BSN)
Nervos has integrated with China’s Blockchain-based Services Network (BSN) as the first public blockchain to join the network. BSN will run Nervos nodes via their public city and urban nodes, making the Nervos blockchain and Nervos applications accessible to millions of potential users and developers via the BSN International Portal. Read more on our blog.
Community updates
Despite the coronavirus pandemic, Nervos still hosted, supported, and presented at many online events.
Conferences and meetups
ZK Workshop (April 4–6)
-Jordan Mack introduced Nervos Grants Program to the ZK community.
World Mining conference hosted by Chainnews Online (April 19th)
-Cofounder Daniel was invited to take part in a panel discussion title “Opportunities in PoW Altcoins.”
Ready Layer 1 (May 4–6)
-Nervos’s Cryptographer Alan Szpeineic gave a talk on “DARK Supersonic SNARKs without a Trusted Setup.”
Silicon Valley Ethereum Meetup (May 10)
-Matt Quinn and Jordan Mack presented Nervos Network to one of the largest Ethereum Meetup Groups.
EUROCRYPT Zagreb, Croatia (May 10–14)
-Nervos’s Cryptographer Alan Szpeineic’s paper was included in the the 39th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques.
Consensus 2020 by CoinDesk — Virtual (May 11–13)
-Cofounder Jan Xie was invited to take part in a panel discussion titled “The China Perspective.”
Connecting Smart Contract Meetup With Chainlink, Conflux, ETC, The Force Protocol (May 27)
-Offline event in Chengdu
Global Mining Forum (May 28–29)
-Cofounder Daniel gave a keynote titled “Opportunities and Challenges in the Next Generation Value Network.”
Connect the Node, Connect the World (June 19)
-Korean community member Mike presented on behalf of Nervos along with Chainlink, Conflux, etc.
AMA Sessions
AMA of Daniel Lv in BeeNest Community on their 2nd anniversary (April 16)
AMA of Daniel Lv in Guowei Financial on the chance and construction of DeFi (April 21)
Live streaming of Daniel Lv host by Platon (April 29)
Interview with Daniel Lv on the halve of Bitcoin host by Zhikuang (May 21)
Panel of the development of public blockchain (May 26)
Interview with Daniel Lv on the introduction of Nervos Network (June 17)
Online Events
Live coding with Xuejie Xiao on open transaction deployment (June 3)
Live streaming of Jan Xie on payment channels (June 17)
Ecosystem developments
Full all the latest updates from the Nervos team, download the Q2 Investor Letter.
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