Secret as a Modular Blockchain
The Confidential Computing Module for the new Blockchain world
Blockchain Architectural Models
With the development of blockchain technology over the past decade, we are witnessing an evolution both of blockchain architecture and of ways of looking at it and classifying it.
In this post, we will describe the most prevalent blockchain architecture models — Monolithic, Hierarchical, and Modular, and see how the new vision of Secret fits the novel Modular paradigm.
Let’s dive in.
The Monolithic Model
The initial blockchains, starting with Bitcoin, were created using a monolithic architecture, where one piece of software is responsible for all the functionality. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and their respective clones and variants — all those blockchains followed, at least initially, the same monolithic design.
The monolithic design has its benefits — all parts of a blockchain node are running in the same executable, meaning relative ease of testing and deployment, low-latency communication between different modules, resource efficiency, and more.
However, monolithic designs are rigid and may prevent radical changes — after all, everything is tightly coupled.
The Hierarchical Model
As the technology evolved and blockchain usage grew, limitations of this architecture became apparent, and “Second Layer” or “L2” solutions started to be considered, with the first L2 network being faster payment infrastructures like Lightning for Bitcoin and Plasma for Ethereum, followed by a plethora of solutions like Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, and many more. Originally, the architecture assumed only two layers, but the neat hierarchical structure does have its charm, and people started calling Dapps “Layer 3”, the User Interface “Layer 4”, and the cross-chain bridging services “Layer Zero”
The benefits of “Layer Two” solutions are clear — they allow overcoming the deficiencies of the original monolithic design (mainly in terms of costs and scalability), thus making on-chain applications cheaper and faster
The Functional Model and Modular Architecture
Recently a different layer-based model started to gain traction — the functional layers model. This model distinguishes between four core functions (or layers) of blockchains — Execution, Consensus, Data Availability, and Settlement.
- Execution layer is about handling the processing of transactions and smart contracts.
- Consensus layer is responsible for getting agreement on the correct order of transactions and the state of the blockchain. It ensures that all transactions are valid and approved by the networks
- Data Availability ensures that data related to transactions and blockchain state is available to everyone at all times, and
- Settlement layer takes care of the finality of transactions
The Modular architecture calls for separating the functionality and building specialized blockchains, each ideally tasked with handling just one functionality layer. This, potentially, creates an ideal mix-and-match environment, where developers can innovate on a specific function (e.g. a new consensus layer), but use ready-made modules for other functionlaity.
Here are some examples of such specialized blockchains:
- Execution Layer — Popular Rollup projects that are taking over the Execution layer — Optimism and Arbitrum, Polygon zkEVM and zkSync, the recently announced Eclipse, and many more.
- Data Availability — Celestia took the landscape by storm in 2023, offering a blockchain focused solely on Data Availability and Consensus. Avail joined about a year later. Arguably, decentralized storage projects, such as Arweave, Filecoin, IPFS, and TheGraph, are also operating on the data availability layer.
- Consensus — while not a blockchain per se, but Cosmos Tendermint and Polkadot Substrate are separate reusable modules employed by multiple blockchains to specifically serve as the Consensus layer.
- Settlement — Arguably, as more and more specialized blockchains are developed, the “base layer” chains like Ethereum, Solana, and, possibly, Bitcoin, will be used mostly for settlement
The Fifth Layer
As we’ve just shown, the best minds of the industry are working on specialized solutions for different core aspects of blockchains, and creating a modular ecosystem where solutions can be built by mixing and matching best-of-breed components for different layers.
We believe that it is time to add one more layer to the model — the Confidential Computing or Confidential Execution Layer. This layer coexists with the “regular” transparent execution layers and is employed in cases when some computations need to be done confidentially, or some information must not be indiscriminately shared.
The chart below paraphrases Celestia’s chart from their excellent Modular and Monolithic Blockchains piece:
Secret’s Confidential Execution Layer is a decentralized, scalable, and secure runtime to perform private computation on data originating from any blockchain. Imagine a DEX deployed on Ethereum that has confidential limit orders, a DAO deployed on Arbitrum that has a confidential voting feature, or an NFT marketplace deployed on Polygon where every NFT has locked content that is only available to the owner. Other use cases include AI modeling on confidential data, Decentralized On-Chain Identity, Sealed-Bid Auctions, and more.
Secret EVM Developer Toolkit
To demonstrate those use cases and simplify onboarding for EVM developers, we created our confidentiality-focused EVM Developer toolkit.
The toolkit contains a growing set of primitives or basic apps for those and other use cases. Those primitives hide the complexity of cross-chain communication and offer developers an easy way to create new apps or expand existing apps’ functionalities to realms that were not available before.
Each such primitive includes a smart contract on an EVM chain, a smart contract on Secret, and a communication mechanism, such as Axelar General Message Passing (GMP) bridge, as well as detailed documentation on how to deploy them. The Toolkit is being actively developed, and more use cases will be addressed in the near future.
We welcome developers to play with the EVM Developer toolkit and build applications on top of it.
About Secret Network
Secret is the confidential computing hub for Web3. Learn more and join the privacy conversation by connecting with our official accounts.
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