Vite Technical AMA Live Broadcast Translation — Part 2

Featuring Allen Liu, Director of Technology at Vite Labs

Vite Editor
Vite Labs
8 min readOct 15, 2019

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Part 2, in which Allen continues answering everyone’s questions…

Q11. Use of atomic swaps has gained popularity, why doesn’t Vite support atomic swaps in its cross-chain design?

Atomic swaps are suitable for the swapping of chain assets between two peer users, but are less suitable as cross-chain gateway solutions for several reasons: 1)they are not suitable for exchanges between multiple users; 2) they requires smart contract or script support on the opposing chain; and 3) they are inefficient when the opposing chain is not found, thus requiring the intervention of a middleman, usually an official.

Q12. Why did Vite choose to have a feeless transaction model?

The economic model aims to strike a balance among users, developers and miners. We believe that ordinary users and developers should not limit their activity due to things such as gas fees, which is why we intentionally made the decision to integrate free transactions when we were building Vite. Additionally, miners are also important contributors to the Vite network and therefore must also receive reasonable incentives. We reward miners using the annual 3% inflation rate. This standard is a reasonable figure for miners, users and developers and and will help sustain the long-term development of the Vite ecosystem.

Q13. Since Vite uses an asynchronous system that separates the transaction requests and transaction responses, does this increase the overall transaction processing times? Will this cause transaction delays?

The answer is no. Vite’s Snapshot chain generates a global consensus in 1 second for the two-level confirmation, so the longest confirmation time is 1 second. Compared to Bitcoin’s 10 minutes and Ethereum’s 10–20 seconds, this 1 second confirmation is sufficiently fast for most application scenarios. Separating the transaction into the request and response in advance helps in smoothing out the process through the peaks and troughs in the system. Since the transactions do not need to wait in order to be processed in batches, scalability is improved.

Q14. ViteX’s operation is not user friendly: a buy or sell order that occurs on the PC side also requires a code to be scanned via the mobile wallet, resulting in possible missed opportunities at peak trading times. How will this be resolved in the future?

The ViteConnect QR code is for added security. It’s very dangerous to save private keys or mnemonics in your browser. Therefore, we use the QR code to temporarily bind the sign-in to the mobile phone wallet, thus ensuring that the private key is not transmitted to the browser, which is much safer. In the future, we will launch a hardware wallet that supports ViteX. The private key will be stored in the hardware wallet connected to the computer, so there is no need to use the mobile App to establish a connection.

In fact, Binance DEX will adopt a similar solution.

Q15. What efforts will Vite make to further the development of the ecosystem?

Development of the ecosystem should be the second stage in the development of a public chain. Vite attaches great importance to this phase. First of all, at the outset, we set aside 25% of VITE tokens for ecosystem development and developer support. Secondly, in terms of underlying tool support, we have recently invested more energy in the improvement at the external interface level, which we will soon release to the public. Once again, we plan to hold several hackathon events, invite more developers to come and build on the Vite public chain. We also plan to post bounty missions in Q4 of 2019 in order to allow the developer community to fully participate in the development of our Mainnet.

At present, we have also established technical zones in social media and forums, with an active cast of whole-node operators, super-nodes, dApp developers, etc., so that developers inside Vite and external community developers and community developers can communicate and participate in the development of our ecosystem.

Q16. GRIN is already supported in the Vite iOS wallet, when will it be supported in the Android wallet?

This question can be answered in one sentence, due to the increased demand for GRIN support in the Android wallet, we have started development, please look forward to it!

17. What advantages does Vite have over EOS?

Vite supports multiple layers of consensus. In theory, there can be any number of consensus groups in the Vite network. Each consensus group has the ability to support one or more separate contract chains. The agent node of the consensus group is also the certifier of the contract. This model can support a private or a chain of logic levels. EOS is not designed in this way.

One may call into question EOS ‘s centralization of 21 nodes for consensus, as compared to Vite’s consensus via multiple consensus groups. Finally, the snapshot consensus group only needs to verify the correctness of these smart contracts. It is not responsible for the signing contracts and since the signature of the delegated consensus group cannot be forged, the data cannot be falsified.

Q18. Vite is a free public chain, how can it prevent spam attacks? Is it like in EOS in setting a stake ratio?

The economic model for staking is similar. It is a very mature model. When Vite has a large number of transactions in the network reaching a certain threshold, there will be a mechanism for dynamic quota adjustment, that is, it will take several times to even ten times the quota before a transaction is sent.

19. What are your characteristics compared to NEO’s notary and hash lock modes?

In Vite 1.0, the cross-chain solution is a hosted gateway, which is a gateway based on the notary mechanism that you mentioned. The Vite 1.0 gateway is designed to be convenient and practical and can quickly support the cross-chain needs of the exchange’s users. The managed gateway is a very mature solution both technically and in practice. In Vite 2.0, the gateway will not be the only means to serve the exchange. As the whole cross-chain solution becomes handled by a lower layer protocol, we will adopt a decentralized solution based on the relay chain.

Q20. What are the advantages of Vite as a public chain?

Vite is the first DAG public chain to support smart contracts, snapshot chain, asynchronous architecture, HDPoS layered consensus, etc. Please refer to the previous answers for more details.

Q21. Tell us about your smart contract implementation. Is the contract implemented in the Snapshot chain?

I think this is a question related to the execution of a smart contract. The execution of a contract is not implemented in the Snapshot chain, but is distributed to the proxy nodes of each delegate consensus group. These proxy nodes are external to the smart contract that specifies this group as the consensus group. The Snapshot chain serves as Vite’s top-level consensus mechanism and only verifies and snapshots these contract blocks to ensure the correctness and security of the contract status.

Q22. What progress has VITE made in terms of making payments more convenient?

Payments are an important aspect for blockchain applications, and Vite has continued to do work within tbhis field. Vite chain’s feeless transaction and fast confirmation time give Vite a natural advantage when it comes to payment processing. We launched VitePay as a payment solution on the Vite public chain where merchants can use Vite or stablecoins to settle transactions. We have plans to add support for more cryptocurrencies in the future.

ViteStore is a Vite mall where users can use VCP (Vite Community Points) to purchase Vite and swag in the mall. It will also support other merchants in the future. For external payments, we have selected some partners in the industry to promote VitePay-based payment networks.

Q23. Vite has asynchronous architecture, I would like to ask what Vite is doing to ensure the consistency of the transaction data between the two sides of the asynchronous communication?

Strong consistency is not guaranteed, but eventual consistency is. Taking into account performance and scalability, Vite abandoned the strong consistency design in Ethereum, but adopted a message-driven architecture to treat each smart contract as a separate service. The contract is communicated through messages and do not share status. The message sending operation does not roll back because of the failures in the reception of a message, improving scalability by ensuring final consistency of the contract state.

Q24. What is Vite’s staking economic model?

Vite uses the HDPoS consensus mechanism of HDPoS. Transaction confirmation and packaging in the Vite network is handled by the top 100 supernodes. The first 25 are called the main nodes, and the last 75 are the secondary nodes. Each year, the Vite public chain will issue 30 million VITE tokens as super node incentive rewards. Every day, there will be about 82,000 VITE rewards for the top 100 super nodes. 50% of a super node’s rewards will come from the number of blocks it generates, and the other 50% will come from the proportion of its vote in the top 100 votes. That is, the more uptime a supdernode has and the more votes it collects from the community, the more rewards it receives.

To become a super node, you need to stake 1 million VITE for a period of 3 months. You can withdraw your staked VITE after 3 months. At present, there are 51 supernodes in the Vite ecosystem. For each supernode, the recent 1-year ROI is between 15–40%.

Q25. Finding real world blockchain uses cases has always been a concern for everyone. What specific applications does Vite hope to address?

The first application is Vite’s decentralized exchange, ViteX. It is a completely decentralized exchange built on Vite’s public chain. The exchange is community-run by ViteX Operators (which anyone can become, and 100% of its income is distributed as dividends to the community. ViteX was launched on July 30, and the current daily trading volume has exceeded 2 million USD — surpassing that of Binance DEX.

The second application is our “Public Chain for Public Good”. We have established a relationship with the Syracuse government in New York. Using Vite’s decentralized technology, we built an app that helps address the problem of housing crisis in Syracuse by using blockchain for public finance. We created a token economy that incentivizes city residents to donate to a collective fund, which is then used to provide emergency housing funds for low-income residents. In return, the donors receive tokens that they can use toward local perks, such as discounts at a local hair salon or product. We have also proposed this model to several other US municipal governments, such as Berkeley and Rhode Island. We will continue to partner with local governments and residents to solve public financing problems through decentralized technology.

The third application is blockchain-based payment. Currently, we have two products, ViteStore and VitePay, that support users in using cryptocurrencies for online shopping. On the Vite Store, you can purchase Vite swag using Vite and VCP (Vite Community Points) in under a minute. At the same time, we plan to empower more community groups to operate using our blockchain payment system, such as allowing community members to open stores, selling their own goods and using virtual currency to complete transactions.

The fourth application is the building of the Vite ecosystem. Vite’s decentralized, multi-chain wallet has an accumulated the daily user activity of 20,000 with 200,000+ downloads. Since opening development to the community, we have seen the development of more than ten games on the Vite chain based on our smart contracts. As more developers join in, there will be more diversified applications.

End of Part 2. We hope you enjoyed this AMA and learned something new about our tech and future plans!

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