DevCon5 — What is Klaytn?
Junghyun Kim, Lead of Platform & SDK at Ground X, presented at DevCon5 on Klaytn’s extension of Ethereum’s account and transaction models. Ground X is the blockchain software engineering studio of Kakao, Korea’s dominant messaging application. Klaytn has been forked from Ethereum to address some of the requirements identified for enterprise adoption in Korea, specifically:
- Immediate finality
- High performance
- High scalability
- Hybrid network architecture
- High usability
The mainnet launched in June 2019. The usability limitations in Ethereum that Klaytn aims to address primarily center around:
- Immutable private key
- Lack of multisig mechanism
- Hard to extend functionality
- Unnecessary fields of transactions
- Lack of fee delegation
In particular the last point has come up in many conversations at DevCon that focused on the user experience. Handling of private keys is difficult enough, but then have the users pay for the gas for their transactions is another unnecessary obstacle. Imagine you had to pay a fee whenever you tweet, or if you want to give your users a free trial period.
Klaytn extends the account and transaction model of Ethereum. Let’s start with the account model:
- Changeable private keys
- Support of multiple private keys
- Support of role-based keys, i.e. limited to transactions, account updates or fee paying
And for the transaction model:
- Multiple transaction types
- Fee delegation
The different handling of keys leads also a modified method for the verification of the sender, as outlined above.
Further, additional transaction types have been introduced. While Ethereum knows value transfer, smart contract deploy, and smart contract execution, Klaytn adds a memo value transfer and an account update, in addition to allowing fee delegation for all Klaytn-based transaction types. Klaytn is backwards compatible to Ethereum, so all Ethereum transaction can be executed on the Klaytn mainnet.
Junghyun demonstrated that the performance overhead for the additional account and transaction type functionality, largely because of the more complex sender verification, is about 10% over Ethereum. From a storage perspective, additional account types lead to a small overhead (75MB based on the size of Ethereum mainnet in September 2019), while the removal of unnecessary fields for Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) reduces storage by 80% (3.8GB as of September 2019).
In summary, a negligible performance degradation is outweighed by improved usability and extensibility and reduced storage cost.
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