TOP Network: Decentralized Communication — Part 2: TOP Network Architecture
For the first part of this article and the history of the fourth revolution, please look here.
TOP is testing it’s the second testnet at the time of writing, with the third one planned for Q2, as well as the launch of the mainnet. TOP token is launched on Huobi, it’s official exchange partner. So far it has achieved significant strategic partnerships, among them Ontology Trust Network and Algorand(Founder Silvio Micali, Turing award winner and known for work on Zero-Knowledge Proof)
TOP Network is a decentralized open communication network powered by blockchain 4.0 technology. It will provide decentralized cloud communication services such as messaging, VoIP, video, streaming, VPN, CDN, IoT data sharing, storage and more for millions of users.
Virtually every blockchain project that we see today is facing the blockchain trilemma of security, scalability, and decentralization. This basically means that no consensus network has found a system where all three are guaranteed, so sacrifice is made to focus on two of the other points.
Example:
Bitcoin is the most secure, because of its PoW consensus mechanism with the most computational power worldwide devoted to it. There really isn’t a sole country that can take on the network, and even it could do so, at most it can pull off a double spend, which might be rejected by the minority of the network if it is known to be an attack. Bitcoin is also decentralized in a way that there are thousands of nodes with a full history of the Bitcoin ledger all the way to the genesis block. These nodes broadcast the history in case of an attack and simply choose to reject the majority until it’s no longer malevolent. This would make an attack on Bitcoin exceedingly far more costly than it would be to help secure the network and get rewarded for it.
However, it’s base layer doesn’t scale at all. It can do only about 10 transactions per second, so use cases like electronic cash(to be easily spendable for a coffee or anything) can be dismissed in its current form. No one wants to wait at least 10 minutes (1 confirmation) for a small transaction. 30 seconds would be a stretch already. For a larger transaction, you might even need to wait 30 minutes or 60, since 1 confirmation might not be enough.
A layer two solution like the Lightning Network helps, but talking about Bitcoin alone, the trilemma is clear.
A payment network needs a whole lot more transactions per second, but a telecommunication messaging network needs way more than that. VisaNET does around 2,000 transactions on average per seconds and could do lot’s more, but that’s still nothing compared to communication services that consistently have a huge volume of high-frequent, real-time transactions. A messaging network might need to handle 6-700,000 messages per second
TOP Network and more clearly TOP Chain might be pioneering in solving the trilemma. It mainly does this in a rather ingenious way — it can’t do it with one blockchain, so why not more? So it builds multiple chains. Each designed with its own purpose.
from the whitepaper:
TOP Chain adopts innovative technologies including double lattices to organize transactions, directed acyclic graph structure to organize blocks, two-layered sharding, high-speed concurrent Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus mechanism, and trusted off-chain processor.
What this means will be explained in detail. This multi-layer architecture is worth discussing and that’s the point of this article, so buckle up!
“TOP is an ecosystem for cloud communication services.” This is saying that the computer data needed to support such a system is logically placed in multiple servers and multiple locations. When it says it’s “open”, it means it’s permissionless (anyone can join and participate in the ecosystem). Anyone can join, contribute and get rewarded in its cloud-based ecosystem — participants provide security, scalability and ensure decentralization by allocating their devices for consensus or bandwidth capacity for network robustness. In this way, participants can become miners that contribute resources and are rewarded in the ecosystem’s native token: TOP.
TOP token is the thread that connects all parties in the ecosystem and will sustain the growth of the ecosystem’s two separate, yet interconnected, token economies, namely the TOP Network cloud communication service platform, and the TOP Public Blockchain platform.
An example:
Anna the owner of the ANNA DAPP needs to pay the miners for their contributed resources to run her Dapp and will do so with the TOP token. For every GB the Dapp uses, the miner asks 1 TOP token. So if 0.5 GB is used, Anna pays 0.5 TOP to the miners. If 1 TOP is 1 cent, it means the GB of data is processed for the price of 0.5 cents. If the miner wants more, he can ask for 2 TOP and the price he asks for processing that 0.5 GB becomes 1 cent effectively. The miners don't need to ask the prices directly, but this is done per smart contract, realized through a decentralized market, automatically matching Dapps with the service nodes.
In the rare case of a totally decentralized app with no owner, then it is the end users of the Dapp who should pay the miners directly.
Some services should be free, I mean, who’s going to use the system if people would have to pay for their messaging if existing services are doing it for free (at the cost of your user data)? Besides, the cost to put that transaction on the ledger is much higher than the cost of delivering the actual message.
Nodes who participate in such a manner are still rewarded by TOP in relation to their contribution. General transactions itself are free of GAS(like most blockchains), but it will charge for certain types of transactions or resources including high-value transactions, high-frequency transactions, account registration and the deployment of smart contracts. The tokens received from these fees are not used to reward nodes, but instead are burned to offset the additional tokens issued each year, keeping the total number of tokens in the system flat or a little bit lower in the system
Of course, without end users, this beautiful system wouldn’t mean anything. Luckily, TOP Network got that covered as well with three apps with a huge user base(50+ million).
So far, to cater to all these DAU’s (daily active users), nothing in the blockchain industry is capable of handling such a volume. This is the reason why the TOP ecosystem can’t function properly on any other existing infrastructure. A new approach was needed and so TOP Network started to build the next generation of blockchains.
TOP NETWORK ARCHITECTURE OVERVIEW
The underlying infrastructure layer of TOP has four components:
1) TOP Communication Network: a distributed network for cloud communication services(ORANGE).
2) TOP Storage Network: a distributed network for storage service(PURPLE).
3) TOP Chain: a distributed ledger(YELLOW).
4) TOP Off-chain: a trusted off-chain processor(YELLOW).
The network layer, the physical infrastructure layer of TOP, is a peer-to-peer network maintained by the miners (participants who allocate the required resources, see above). This layer consists of three sub-networks (bottom row).
- There’s the main chain. This chain is the settlement layer that can be seen as most cryptocurrencies out there. It’s the immutable distributed ledger that keeps tracks of everyone’s TOP tokens and settles transactions. (YELLOW)
- There’s the off-chain. This processor and ledger that stores and processes the business data to reduce stress on the settlement layer. We can see this as a layer 2 solution, or as a service layer in other blockchains, like Cardano(YELLOW).
- The third sub-network consists out of two elements:
a) TOP Communication Network, a distributed network for communication services, like Content Delivery Networking (CDN), Streaming, Internet of Things, RCS (Rich Communication Services), etc. See the service layer (ORANGE)
b) TOP Storage Network, a distributed network for storage services. The distributed network for storage is another part of the ecosystem that participants can allocate their excess storage in exchange for the TOP token, which in turn can be traded or used in the ecosystem. See the service layer (PURPLE)
These four separate components prevent congestion and backlogging on the network as a whole. In this way, a very stable fast network is established and thus capable of handling the volumes needed for its ambitious goals.
If all would be done on one network, it would simply collapse under its own weight and stress.
The (ORANGE and PURPLE) service layer is the payment service (cryptocurrency), smart contract support, cloud communication services, distributed storage services, and other on-chain services. This layer offers a broad number of services that we see as separate projects in the space. TOP offers them in one ecosystem. This is what it means to be ready for real business. Why would you chose all these different services from different providers if you can find them all in one?
The (BLUE) Interface layer TOP Network provides communication services for Dapps through its API’s(Application Program Interface)and SDK’s(Software Development Kits). TOP Network also provides cross-chain bridges to export its communication services to other blockchain platforms. This means TOP Network’s ecosystem is interoperable with other systems, which is needed for blockchains in the future, in my opinion.
Dapps (GREEN) are the applications users actually use. Users only need to interact with the Dapps and of course, the TOP token. Users don’t really care about decentralization or how it works. Users just want it to work. Most of this architecture is for developers and real-world businesses only to work with.
A Dapp is a distributed application built and deployed on TOP. There are two categories for Dapps in the TOP ecosystem. One for each of the separate platforms (distributed cloud communication platform and a public blockchain platform):
- Apps using distributed cloud communication services provided by TOP (think of messaging apps, video calling, etc)
- Apps only interacting with smart contracts deployed on TOP Chain (think of games, financial settlement, ICO, etc.)
Now that we have discussed the TOP Network architecture a bit, it is time to go down the rabbit hole a bit further. One of the major pain points blockchain technology still has is the limited throughput between nodes in the permissionless public network. TOP Network still set out to reach the immense volume of transactions needed for a cloud communication network that is capable of settling transactions and smart contracts on a public blockchain, unlike EOS, for instance, that has chosen a few permissioned nodes (Block Producers) to execute consensus over the network — and thus sacrificed decentralization (at least in the early phases) to deal with the trilemma, TOP does not compromise decentralization and keeps its capacity to deal with the volume to handle complex real-world businesses on the blockchain.
To achieve this all, TOP Network needed to address the following points to become ready for real-world business:
- There won’t be a fixed solution to every business since every business is rather unique. Similar to what Ontology has in mind, it needs to have ready-made or customizable solutions for complex business logic that unique real-world businesses need to migrate to the blockchain.
- A large variety of businesses mean a LOT of data that need to be stored. Large block on-chain will make it very hard to keep track of it all from the beginning to the end (Ethereum might have only 1 node with a fully kept history). On TOP blockchain platform, most business data are processed and stored by off-chain processors in a trusted manner. Only the aggregated data are uploaded to the blockchains.
- Even though a lot of the business data will be stored in a trusted manner off-chain, TOP Network still needs to submit an enormous amount of business transactions to a single service chain on the blockchain platform
- Users expect the best service they can get and in this high paced world, no one wants to wait. TOP needs instant confirmations of transactions and uses a lattice data structure (like NANO or IOTA) for this.
- Again, some services on TOP are to be without fees (Zero transaction fees). The settlement price for a message is very low and the platform will not charge any transaction fee. Otherwise, it wouldn’t economically make sense for a business to migrate to the blockchain.
- 6) Secure and flexible smart contracts, both Turing and non-Turing complete.
The TOP blockchain platform is a three-layer architecture: one main chain, multiple service chains, and off-chain processors.
The main chain is responsible for the financial settlement of the TOP token, the registry of service chains, time-stamping, etc. The consensus algorithm is pBFT-dPoS (practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance- delegated Proof of Stake)
The service chains are the ones needed for Dapps on the cloud communication platform and interact with the main chain whenever account registry, address the interaction of settlement is needed. These service chains are customizable to businesses specifically. This also means the consensus mechanism can be tailored to that specific chain. There are proposals like Proof-of-Bandwidth, for instance, that decide on having enough bandwidth to participate.
The off-chain processors are trusted processors with a verifiable reputation and like the service chains, reduces stress on the main chain.
The two types of smart contracts that TOP offers are: Platform Contracts for asset transaction and Service Contract for cloud communication services. These are executed separately in isolated virtual machines, based on WASM, so both security and flexibility are ensured.
TOP Chain uses both directed acyclic graph (DAG) data structures and “regular” blockchain data structure, for swift transaction organization and state finality.
At the current state of affairs, blockchain (permissionless peer-2-peer broadcasting network) is really just an experimental technology with possibly a lot of future potential, but is at the moment nowhere near a serious competitor for existing centralized counterparties. For instance: confirmation times are a disaster at times when you need a swift settlement of payment.
One of the solutions to this problem is to scale and be able to increase the capacity of the network to transact. Most common ways to approach this issue is to improve the consensus algorithm. Remember Bitcoin’s PoW? It’s an ingenious mechanism that is designed to do one block per 10 minutes on average. 10 whole minutes for 1 block confirmation and this is done for safety reasons. No matter how much hash power is used to do the necessary work, the system adjusts every two weeks and sets the difficulty to ten minutes (on average) per block. You need multiple confirmations to know the transactions registered in the immutable ledger are on the longest chain and thus correct.
You can imagine, for many real-world businesses and use cases, this just won’t cut it. One of the mean reasons why the electronic cash meme turned into a store of value meme for Bitcoin(ok, digressing here).
Besides improving on the efficiency of the consensus algorithms, two more strategies to improve the transaction processing capacity of public blockchains:
Vertical Scale-Up:
This is what we would find under the hood of permissioned networks and EOS’ Block Producers: each node has access to powerful computing power, large throughput bandwidth, and huge memory. These nodes are capable of processing everything on their own and communicate with other nodes to form a network. This comes very close to a centralized system, or a semi-decentralized system at most.
In a decentralized network, not all nodes have the same access to the same computational power and thus is vertical scaling up not a great solution for a public broadcasting network. The biggest threat to a vertical scaled up system is that of cyber attacks. Attacking nodes can compromise a lot of data or a Sybil attack is possible.
Horizontal Scale-Out
This is what most architects of blockchains are searching to solve: the issue of sharding. The consensus network is divided into several smaller groups that can process transactions or consensus is a much faster way. The problem with this is that these smaller parts, called shards, might have difficulty communicating with each other and still communicate to a certain node, which in turn can be stressed and congested. Even more problematic in a permissionless system, is that nodes may decide to come and go.
There are some blockchain projects that proposed some really interesting solutions to this problem, and of course, with TOP’s ambition, it has a solution of its own — layer network architecture and two-layer sharding.
Nice! you say?
Absolutely. Keep reading (part 3 coming up soon).
You can find TOP Network on:
Email Contact: contact@topnetwork.org
Official Website: http://www.topnetwork.org
Telegram: https://t.me/topnetwork_top
Twitter: https://twitter.com/topnetwork_top
Medium: https://medium.com/@topnetwork
Steemit: https://steemit.com/@topnetwork-top
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/topnetwork_top
About TOP Network
TOP Network is a decentralized open communication network that provides cloud communication services on the blockchain. TOP offers secure, low-cost services such as messaging, calling, video, VPN, CDN, IoT data sharing and more.
TOP Network is also a high-performance public blockchain platform designed to handle real-world business of any size or volume. Powered by innovations including three-layer network, two-layer sharding, two-layer lattice DAG and PBFT-DPoS*, TOP can process several hundred thousand transactions per second on the blockchain.
The long-term mission of TOP Network is to build a public blockchain infrastructure for all Dapps. Our world-class team of over 100 developers is striving for this goal.
TOP Network originated from the common underlying network layer of Dingtone, CoverMe, and SkyVPN, three communication apps built by the TOP team before the blockchain project. These apps, having attracted over 60 million users in total, will be ported to TOP Network upon the launch of TOP and generate huge volumes of transactions in the TOP ecosystem.
TOP Network was founded by serial entrepreneur Steve Wei and his colleagues in late 2017. Steve was one of the earliest employees of WebEx in the 1990s. After WebEx, he founded a successful video conferencing software company which was acquired by Huawei in 2010. In 2012, Steve co-founded Dingtone, a public listed company operating popular communication apps such as Dingtone, CoverMe, and SkyVPN.
TOP Network has closed $11 million early investments from prestigious institutional investors and individual billionaire investors, including DHVC, Fenbushi Capital, NEO Global Capital (NGC), Ontology Global Capital (OGC), LD Capital and more.
