TOP Network. What it is and where it’s going.
Blockchain is hot. Not as hot as December 2017, but there’s still a lot of buzz going on, especially for an asset market of only 140 billion at the time of writing.
While a lot of projects are failing because of bad fund management (imagine your treasury going down 80% in less than a year), or simply because the project wasn’t that great anyways. You really don’t need Ethereum to gamble. Casino’s have been doing a great job for a long time already. Economist like Nouriel Roubini did raise good points about this space, being full of scams and charlatans.
Thankfully, it’s not all gloom and doom. Bitcoin is still bitcoin and true to its whitepaper, it’s bringing us decentralization. This is generally speaking blockchain 1.0. Alice sends Bob x amount of money through a peer-to-peer permissionless system. Meaning everyone can join this payment network and no need for a third party! A distributed ledger for everyone.
Ethereum and other smart contract platforms added a condition to this, so Alice could send money (or tokens) under certain conditions. Small applications could settle their transactions in this matter now. In came version 2.0. Soon people found out to make use of these possibilities in an efficient way, the network was way too slow(Crypto Kitties) for a lot of users. And living in this time and age, nobody wants to wait. If a website takes 10 seconds to load, you will try to find an alternative. Scaling became an issue. The fact that Ethereum is written in Solidity didn’t make it much easier for developers to adapt to this new network.
Architects of blockchains started thinking about how to deal with this scalability issue. Some thought to step away from the PoW-consensus model, and thus sacrificing security, was the way, others implemented different methods of block production, multiple chains or discarded the parental connection to the genesis block. A lot of things were done, but if we take a look at EOS, what we got is something that looks a lot more like the legacy systems we already have.
Another thing that came with these (rushed?)“3.0” chains, is solely the framework. Ok, now we got a fast network, but there’s no support to build on them. This makes it very costly to develop and run an application. And even without adoption, who will use these costly apps? Still back to the drawing board.
TOP Network is a self-proclaimed Blockchain 4.0. Although I am not a big fan of throwing around version X and Y, they do have a lot of things covered that these version 1, 2 and 3 didn’t have.
A problem with existing blockchains is there isn’t really a lot of users. Without users, blockchain and crypto simply remain an experimental technology and will never grow out of being a speculative asset class (basically gambling).
Luckily more and more people see the potential in Distributed Ledger Technology and better infrastructures are build as we speak. TOP is one of these very well-thought designed infrastructures with the architecture to support it.
The architecture of TOP Network is an impressive mix of the best of what we have seen so far in the crypto space: A three-layered high-performance DAG-based blockchain with the main chain for settlements, service-chains for traffic and an off-chain solution for storage. Let’s dive into this and what it exactly means.
FROM THE WHITEPAPER:
The network layer, the physical infrastructure of TOP, is a peer-to-peer network provided and maintained by miners. It has three sub-networks:
- TOP Chain consists of a main chain and multiple service chains. It provides ledger, payment service and cryptocurrency for the TOP ecosystem
- TOP off-chain is a processor and ledger that stores and processes business data off the chain in a trustworthy manner to reduce the workload and frequency of data processing on the blockchain ledgers.
- TOP Network consists of two parts: TOP Communication Network, a distributed network for communication services and TOP Storage Network, a distributed network for storage service
TOP is clearly designed with a million transactions per second (TPS) in mind and adjusted to the modern day limitations of blockchain networks. Keeping everything on chain is proven impossible so far. Below is a visual of the data being processed.
Every settlement is done on the main chain and for every service, a separate service chain is used. Service logs are stored in layered ledgers.
So what I get from this is that user-accounts for different services are organized together in zones, which uses sharding (partitioning of data) for fast service transactions, the service log itself is kept off-chain and settlements transactions are done on the main chain. Dapps are kept on these service chains and function with this infrastructure. Logs are kept for backtracking off-chain, so these chains are not taxed with this traffic if not necessary. Same applies for the main chain. Dapps will only interact with the main chain (settlement chain) if TOP token is used for whatever reason on these service chains. The TOP token itself will have multiple use cases as a utility token and next to microtransactions and service subscription, will function for staking in due time.
The main chain has a PBFT-DPoS consensus mechanism and the service-chains use a PoB (proof of burn) and PoST (Proof of Space Time) consensus mechanism.
For non-technical readers, this might be a bit too much and I might write a separate article to go more in-depth(waiting on the release of TOP’s yellowpaper to shed more light on the matter as well).
TOP is build to support all these transactions and for good reason. It will have a huge userbase migrating to TOP Network at the launch of their mainnet already.
This userbase comes mostly from three existing apps that are used every day.
▶Dingtone — Decentralized Messaging App
With more than 36 million users, Dingtone carries 10 billion minutes of VoIP calls every year and sends 1 billion messages daily. Dingtone will become a decentralized messaging app once it moves to TOP.
▶CoverMe — Secure Messaging App
CoverMe is the first messaging app with end-to-end encryption (preceding even Telegram). CoverMe will move to TOP with its 4 million users.
▶SkyVPN — Decentralized VPN Service
SkyVPN has over 12 million users and consumes 200TB of VPN traffic every day. SkyVPN will become a decentralized VPN app on TOP.
This means we will see a used blockchain with actually filled blocks. Everyday users are something rarely seen in today’s blockchains, which is rather ridiculous when you think of it.
Big chance TOP Network will be a point of reference when people ask for a successful project. I am looking forward to seeing this project successfully launch.
TOP Network is being tested at the time of writing, with the help of the growing community, which seems genuinely supportive of the project. The telegram (https://t.me/topnetwork_top) channel has all kinds of interactions that are rewarded with points so everyone can get their hands on some TOP tokens already.
It is great to see this, instead of your average Telegram channel full of bots, ICO flippers and moonboys.
TOP is going for the long haul.
Competitors: AMAZON web services, Whatsapp, YouTube, Telecommunication Services, etc.
Telegram: https://t.me/topnetwork_top
Twitter: https://twitter.com/topnetwork_top
Medium: https://medium.com/top-network
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/topnetworktop/
Discord: https://discord.gg/ZE3Nv59
