TOP Network: The Harbinger of Blockchain 4.0 Era
When Bitcoin made its debut in 2009, blockchain, the ledger behind today's most-traded cryptocurrency, was seen merely as a tool of digital-asset transaction. As smart contract emerges and breaks into the mainstream of coding and development, the blockchain industry comes to recognize that the technology has much more to offer: a decentralized, trust platform to accommodate all the existing categories of real-world applications and business.
Over the decade, no existing blockchain iteration could realize the technology’s unprecedented potential.
Bitcoin, the first-generation blockchain, has been confined to the sole use case of digital currency trade since it kicked off the era of crypto ledger. As the industry struggled to go beyond financial transaction, Ethereum, the second-generation blockchain, fully implementing smart contract across its platform, started the epoch of general-purpose on-chain application and became the first chain to carry a considerable number of Dapps.
However, Ethereum-based Dapps, crippled by the platform’s low TPS, are too slow to compete with their counterparts on centralized networks. The blockchain 3.0 generation, the show time for high-performance public chain, came as EOS vertically scaled itself up to reach thousands of TPS. The improved scalability allows EOS to serve more users. The number of Dapps that have over a thousand daily active users on EOS is about tenfold of that on Ethereum[1].
But the boost in user number on EOS is achieved through a sacrifice of security and decentralization for speed. Instead of letting each node verify transactions, EOS, to increase its TPS, uses only a few permission-based nodes to perform consensus mechanism on behalf of the entire network, falling back to the practice on centralized networks that carry a high risk of user data breach.
Apart from the scalability-safety dilemma, third-generation blockchains like EOS are far from a satisfactory platform for real-world business due to the lack of business-level infrastructure. When developers build apps on centralized networks, lots of development tasks are covered by plenty of open-source tools, off-the-shelf software or cloud-based services, such as cloud storage and database offered by Amazon Web Services. In contrast, Dapp developers have to program almost everything, even the basic one-to-one messaging service, from scratch by themselves, as most third-generation blockchains provide no service-oriented framework on the base-layer ledger. The heavy development workload brings about high costs and long development cycles, discouraging companies from operating their apps on the blockchain.
The blockchain industry is anxious for a next-generation product to take on the mission EOS has failed: To enable all the real-world application and business, regardless of their category, size or volume, on the blockchain. TOP Network, a high-performance, permissionless public chain armed with comprehensive application-level infrastructure, brings the wave of Blockchain 4.0 — the business-friendly public chain.
Almost all the today’s apps are required to implement communication functions such as messaging and calling, but building these functions is time-consuming and costly: without established infrastructure, a company has to hire a bunch of experienced developers to build communication stack and backend software, deploy servers and purchase bandwidth. On TOP Network, we free Dapp developers of all these headaches. Similar to a blockchain-based version of Amazon Web Service, we offer full-stack cloud communication services, including messaging, voice/video, VoIP, VPN, streaming/CDN and IoT data sharing. Companies can easily utilize our services to drive down development costs by over 60% and shorten development cycle. We also provide data storage, DNS and billing services.
On the versatile, service-oriented TOP Network, new service layers can be quickly plugged into the platform. Focusing on in-house development and working proactively with industry partners, we will expand our services beyond communication in the near future, implementing powerful service layers to facilitate Dapps in a wide range of categories, such as gaming, social networking, entertainment and more.
Cloud communication services on TOP Network are offered by various service providers, who tend to charge different prices. Dapps, clients of these service providers, tend to have different requirements regarding the scope, quality and price of services. To help Dapps purchase services efficiently, we create TOP Marketplace, a decentralized, transparent marketplace realized via smart contract. In the marketplace, Dapps submit information on the services they need and service providers post what they can offer. After matching offers and bids based on a series of sophisticated protocols, the marketplace generates contracts for paired parties and monitors contract execution.
(Learn more about the protocols we use for the marketplace in our whitepaper!)
No matter how large the data throughput is, a business-friendly Dapp needs to response instantly to the actions of users, who tend to quit using the Dapp after waiting longer than 5 seconds. This means a Blockchain 4.0 platform needs to have extremely high TPS to verify a massive volume of transactions with low latency. Powered by cutting-edge technologies including two-layer sharding, two-layer lattice DAG, three-layer network and PBFT-DPoS*, TOP Network is horizontally scaled-out to reach over 300,000 TPS while remaining completely permissionless. Dapps on TOP Network never have to worry about the speed-safety dilemma facing EOS.
In the history of technology, every nascent, revolutionary innovation needs to wade across the river of doubts and find its disruptive way to integrate with the established business. A high-performance, permissionless public blockchain well-equipped with business-friendly infrastructure, TOP Network, the pioneer of Blockchain 4.0 era, is ready to prove to the whole world the true value of blockchain: to offer a decentralized, open platform embracing real-world business of any type, size or volume.
