Verus Technical Philosophy: Building the Foundations for a Paradigm Shift
Verus builds additional blockchain primitives into the consensus protocol in order to provide a robust, secure and scalable foundation for global scale distributed and decentralized apps. Verus’ philosophy is that the decentralized internet will not emerge as a system of applications all programmed on a single “global computer” but that it will consist of heterogeneous systems exchanging data that they can all understand (some centralized, some decentralized). Functionality will be triggered from one system to another. Secure systems will include their most important functions at the protocol level.
Bell’s Law states that “roughly every decade a new, lower priced computer class forms based on a new programming platform, network, and interface resulting in new usage and the establishment of a new industry”. Experience shows that this shift comes into effect invisibly at first, and its nature is only widely understood and recognized some five to seven years after the shift began.
We know that the latest Bell’s Law transformation is upon us, and has been for some years, but there is still scant agreement on its specific nature. What we can say for certain, though, is that we are in dire need of a great leap forward in systems, services and usage. Our most recent computing paradigm has given us new toys, tools and businesses. But it has also brought giant internet monopolies that routinely abuse their power and stifle freedom, innovation and wealth creation. This paradigm is noted for constant security breaches and a perceived impossibility to protect even our most important systems from intrusion. Privacy is a non-feature and is abused at will. The individual has been atomized and vassal-ized, forced to pledge fealty to walled-garden network kings in order to earn a living, to learn or to engage in social or cultural life.
In this respect, the preferred benefits of the current Bell’s Law shift would be (i) reduced complexity, (ii) security and privacy as initial and persisting states of the system (not after the fact add-ons), and (iii) self-sovereignty and personal control everywhere. Unreliable, restrictive, extractive centralized services could be replaced by distributed systems that are open and equitable running on reliable public infrastructure.
Verus is an ambitious project that seeks to provide a foundation for this new programming platform, network and interface resulting in new usage and the establishment of a new industry. Verus seeks to be a foundational part of the current Bell’s Law shift, believing that the decentralized and distributed networks pioneered by Bitcoin have marked the beginning of this shift. The Verus developers bring specific experience in application platform creation and seek to enlarge on this by enabling the global-scale distributed and decentralized systems that mark the new era.
Security as the Ground State
Public-key cryptography algorithms are now fundamental ingredients of our data storage, communications and computing systems. But, at the moment, these cryptosystems are not at the core of our computing. Over the last two decades they’ve been layered onto our existing systems through various standards and protocols. The patchwork non-core nature leaves security wanting and difficult to achieve in a lasting and universal way.
What appears to be emerging, though, are systems where security, through asymmetric cryptography, is the ground state. The bitcoin whitepaper laid out “an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust”, thus creating a system that places cryptographic security at its heart. The success of this is self-evident, as the bitcoin system itself has operated openly and continuously since inception, with elegant simplicity and effectively zero security incidents at the protocol level, all while protecting value now measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Verus shares this philosophy, with cryptographic security as a foundational element of the system. Verus builds on bitcoin, expanding the system beyond payment and into other blockchain primitives such as privacy, finance, identification, data, and interoperability with other decentralized and centralized systems. Verus includes these elements at the protocol level. Still, like bitcoin, Verus uses the UTXO accounting method as opposed to an account-based accounting method, an important benefit of which is that transactions (eg. defi) can be trivially verified in parallel. The philosophy of this structure is to provide a foundation to build global distributed systems and applications. It is the basis to reconstruct computer usage.
As part of its philosophy for “security as the ground state”, Verus has settled on the Proof of Power mechanism as the foundational security for its network. Although taking over a chain that uses VerusPoP is not impossible, doing so with a 51% attack would require a combined value of over 50% of both the chain’s hashpower and its coin supply. In addition, Verus has built “quantum-ready” capabilities. It remains only to integrate a quantum secure signature scheme, following which it will be possible to have all of the transactions sent to an address made retroactively quantum resistant.
Decentralized Systems Provide Robust, Open Public Infrastructure
As Satoshi Nakamato has pointed out in his white paper, a decentralized network has unique elements:
The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. Nodes work all at once with little coordination. They do not need to be identified, since messages are not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best effort basis. Nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone. They vote with their [computing] power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.
The robust nature and unstructured simplicity of these networks makes them excellent candidates for public infrastructure. Bitcoin itself is now critical public infrastructure for payments and value.
These networks also resist centralized control, allowing for permissionless use by developers and users. In the case of Bitcoin, this means the ability to store and transact value at will. In Ethereum, it means to deploy programmatic logic and to build and use applications on a shared global virtual machine. In Verus, it means to use key blockchain primitives — privacy, defi, identity, data exchange, interoperability — as the foundation for a world of distributed apps that are ubiquitous, always on and secure, and that can be used in a way that respects user privacy, sovereignty and control at the most fundamental level.
Verus has been designed to create a “naturally decentralized” system, including both miners and stakers. Mining is conducted with the VerusHash algorithm which was developed to equalize mining equitability across hardware classes, and to create a naturally decentralized miner ecosystem. Verus has also prioritized easy onboarding and use for new miners and stakers through the Verus Desktop Wallet, allowing users to easily mine and stake from their wallet. In its current state, Verus has an unusually high number of active nodes (both miners and stakers) in proportion to its market cap, which would be expected to grow further as system take-up grows. A recent estimate from a continuously connected node at the home of a community member showed it had seen over 20,000 node addresses.
Foundational Blockchains Require Key Primitives
The Verus vision is to extend the decentralized network through additional primitives and to make these primitives a first class part of the protocol. The primitives are those necessary to form a reliable foundation for an emerging global distributed network of services. Applications and networks will be built on a basis where security, sovereignty, privacy and interoperability are wired into the core protocol, not added at a second or third layer. This philosophy is quite different from Ethereum and its imitators, which have created very basic blockchain structures as the foundation, with languages running on top that create a sequential computer, in order to provide a basis for applications (where finance, privacy, sovereignty, data and interoperability are intended to be provided by arbitrary applications developers). Verus is convinced that blockchain/application structures of this type are fundamentally difficult to secure and scale. For example, the blockchain doesn’t understand the finance on top of it and so fees can create perverse incentives thus creating security problems. Simply put, the application layer conflicts with the consensus layer.
Instead, security and scalability can be provided by including key primitives at the consensus level of the protocol. In its current thinking, Verus believes that the following primitives are crucial ingredients for a foundational blockchain system to support the new era of global scale distributed systems:
- Payment — the last decade shows that large decentralized systems are based on value (typically money/electricity/work). This is a sina qua non primitive and is included in bitcoin and ethereum. In the Verus system, the coin $VRSC represents the payment primitive in the blockchain.
- Privacy — as a fork of Zcash, shielded transactions in Verus can be fully encrypted on the blockchain, yet still be verified as valid under the network’s consensus rules by using zk-SNARK proofs.
- Finance — defi that is built into the protocol has important advantages over defi that is built as an application on a global sequential computer, including security, scalability and fairness. As important, defi must be integrated at the protocol level in order for one decentralized system to “make a call” to another system, ie. for an ethereum user to seamlessly use the Verus defi protocols or Vault functionality without having to engage Verus or the Verus wallet directly; this type of interconnection creates a truly global application platform that matches the reality of a multitude of computing environments and languages
- Identity/Agency — the necessity for users to own their own identity, data, social graphs and reputation is self-evident — Verus takes this a step further and implements identity as a blockchain primitive, thus enabling what Verus believes to be a core requirement for decentralized identities, a path to recover identity if private keys are lost or stolen
- Data —large distributed and decentralized systems (eg the internet) are built on exchange of data; Verus believes that the decentralized internet will consist of heterogeneous systems exchanging data that they can all understand (some centralized, some decentralized), and Verus will enable this through the ability to define and publish data structures at the protocol level, which can then be shared across bridges and gateways
- Interoperability — Verus works at the protocol level to enable any system to communicate with another in a way that’s reliable and makes sense, using the concepts of “state root” (a one number root that covers the whole blockchain) and notarization signatures which give the ability to prove transactions that exist on another chain. By enabling full scale interoperability at the protocol level the Verus system does not need a turing complete programmable layer, as required actions can occur on other systems where required provided that systems are exchanging data in a way that they can all understand
- Integrated Blockchain Creation —the path to virtually unlimited scalability lies in the ability to provision additional interoperable blockchains at will, without the necessity to provision additional resources (hardware, wallets, etc.). Verus enables this through its PBaaS system where any blockchain can be used to provision a new blockchain that is immediately interoperable to every other Verus blockchain (and thereby to the greater blockchain universe) and has immediate access to the installed base of Verus’ miners, stakers, wallets, apps, etc. These new blockchains inherit Verus’ security through a system of notarization into the main Verus blockchain.
The effect of the design philosophy is to allow functionality that securely and permissionlessly goes across systems, whether from one Verus blockchain to another, or to other blockchain systems such as Ethereum. Functionality can be triggered from one system to another. The fundamental idea is that in the real world we have multitudes of environments and languages, and things connect through data. There is no requirement for a “global computer” that runs applications using a single language — in fact, that method presents clear scaling challenges, and is insecure as value and fees drift to the application layer and are unrecognizable at the protocol level. Instead Verus lays out the fundamental primitives and then application systems are built around that, communicating through data. Verus has currently implemented payment, privacy and identity on its mainnet. Defi at the protocol level is in operation on testnet. Interoperability and blockchain creation is joining on testnet shortly, with data exchange to follow shortly thereafter.
Once these protocols are in place to serve as public infrastructure, Verus expects rapid uptake for users and developers of all kinds to continue building and using the applications of the new era.
