Witnet After Mainnet: This Is Just The Beginning!
The release of the Mainnet is only a first milestone in Witnet’s mission to enable Web 3.0 apps that are truly decentralized and censorship resistant. This is what’s to come.
It’s been exactly 3 years since the Witnet whitepaper was published as a preprint on arXiv. Since then, everyone involved in the project has made a titanic effort to turn this decentralized oracle network into a reality.
Where we are now
The result of all this commitment and sacrifice is outstanding. The Mainnet was launched only 6 weeks ago, yet the network statistics are already staggering:
- More than 75,000 blocks have been appended to the chain by almost 48,000 different mining nodes, who collectively minted 18,750,000 WIT tokens.
- 18,000 data requests have been published and resolved.
- 520,000 transactions transferring WIT tokens have been made.
- Early estimates indicate that the actual number of nodes “waiting in line” for their opportunity to mine a block is close to 1 million. This number seems credible, since we verified the existence of more than 300,000 nodes in the last Testnet, where the incentives for mining were fewer.
Even with some sporadic hiccups — superblock consensus is momentarily lost at some times—the network is holding up remarkably well, especially when considering that no other block chain protocol that we know have ever faced the challenge of communicating and distributing workload among 1 million nodes.
Where we go
We didn’t build Witnet just for the intellectual pleasure of creating rock solid software and hitting some striking numbers. We built Witnet because we do believe in the mission of Web 3.0 — enabling censorship resistant software — and we envision Witnet as a crucial building block for the decentralized applications of the future.
This means that our goals are far from fulfilled —both from the side of software development and from the side of facilitating adoption of Witnet as a the go-to oracle in every smart contracts platform.
Want to discover how do we plan to arrive there? Keep reading!
DISCLAIMER: any forward-looking statements contained in this post are my own opinion and some sort of personal wish list. This is not an official project roadmap. Witnet is a decentralized, open source community effort and Witnet Foundation has no absolute control on the fate of the ecosystem as a whole.
The bridge that Ethereum deserves
The most immediate body of work will be the Witnet<>Ethereum bridge, as this piece of the ecosystem is paramount for adoption. A sheer amount of innovation is going on in the smart contracts space these days (DeFi, etc.), and we need to make sure that the bridge lives up to the strict requirements of those use cases.
The bridge is fully functional in its current form, but its economic viability is rather fragile in the context of gas price spikes. That’s why over the coming weeks and months we’ll be heads down reworking the mechanisms of the bridge to make it much more efficient and cost-effective (by means of adopting some “optimistic” strategies, btw).
Fostering adoption and the first integrations
The Stampery team — which over these 3 years lead the development of witnet-rust and the Sheikah wallet app— is already working in a first integration side by side with one of the most relevant and respected projects in the Ethereum ecosystem. More details will be announced soon!
Our general strategy for adoption will also be published shortly. As a sneak peek, I can advance that it will include hand-holding other projects through the integration process, as well as showcasing the capabilities of the protocol through experimental proof of concepts.
A stronger, more decentralized community
From the very moment we started working on the Witnet protocol we had a clear idea in mind: for it to be successful, both the development and the network had to be truly decentralized.
In this path to radical decentralization, a diverse, strong, decentralized community is capital. That’s why Witnet Foundation is firmly committed to deploy as many resources as possible to support and empower different teams and individuals in the community and, little by little, become contingent or to eventually disappear.
As a first step, we’re about to announce a 3rd phase of the incentive program that drove hundreds of new users into the Testnet and helped testing and improving the software, leading to a successful Mainnet launch. The bug bounty program will also continue, and so will the ecosystem grants for the builders behind relevant pieces of the ecosystem, like the block explorer and the network dashboard.
Expanding to other smart contract platforms
Witnet was always designed as a “blockchain-agnostic” platform, i.e. it can be connected to virtually any smart contracts enabled blockchain through bridges.
The blockchain space is advancing stronger than ever, and innovation is happening everywhere, not only in Ethereum. In particular, we are looking forward to facilitating integration with Ethereum 2.0, Polkadot, NEAR, Cosmos, Oasis and some others.
In a future scenario in which multiple smart contract platforms thrive independently, if Witnet gets to capture a significant part of the oracle queries from each of those networks, then Witnet could become even bigger than some of those protocols separately.
Using Witnet as a standalone solution for conditional payments… and atomic swaps!
The concept of conditional payments have been around ever since the Witnet whitepaper was published. Also known as “WitScript”, this feature allows Witnet transaction outputs to be encumbered with simple scripts that rule when and how they can be spent by the receiver. Not that different from Bitcoin’s own scripting features — except for one important detail: payments can be conditioned on the results of data requests. That is, you can create a transaction that boils down to “if tomorrow rains, pay Alice, otherwise pay Bob”.
We have always believed that conditional payments have the potential to cover some very interesting and valuable use cases that don’t really need the complexity of the “rich statefulness” of Solidity, and would greatly benefit from the simplicity of this feature. Long story short, conditional payments make Witnet become a “smarter Bitcoin”.
What’s more, implementing conditional payments — properly speaking, scripting capabilities —would also enable atomic swaps of WIT tokens, i.e. the ability to exchange WIT for BTC or ETH with no intermediaries or counterparty risk.
A lighter wallet app, and support for cold wallets (Trezor, Ledger, etc.)
Wallets are a key part of the ecosystem in every block chain network. Not solely for the fun of sending and receiving tokens. For the cryptoeconomic incentives of network to function as expected, the tokens need to easily arrive from former users to new users. A secure and usable wallet is thus vital for the network to thrive.
When designing the Sheikah Witnet wallet app, we went full crypto paranoid mode, and made it totally decentralized. That is, your Sheikah wallet downloads every block in the chain and locally analyzes them in search for transactions going in and out of your wallet. This architecture is great for privacy: your addresses are kept secret and local at all times.
However, not every user has the same radical concerns about privacy, and the more mainstream cryptocurrencies become, the more users will appear with different trade-offs in terms of privacy vs. convenience.
For this reason, it is natural that at some point the ecosystem will start to work on a lighter approach to a Witnet wallet that keeps your private keys and derives addresses locally but then queries a third party block explorer for transactions affecting those addresses. This could be easily implemented as a “lightweight mode” inside Sheikah, or with some more effort, as a totally separate app or website.
It is also easy to imagine that sooner or later, the rising interest in the project from the public will lead to cold wallets like Trezor or Ledger to eventually support WIT tokens.
Improved throughput and long-term sustainability for the chain
Block size limits exist in most block chains for a good reason: if the blocks are unlimited in size, the chain may grow boundlessly, making it almost impossible for most users to keep a full archival node, thus jeopardizing decentralization.
In the case of Witnet, the limits to transactions and data requests per block that currently exist in the protocol were calculated so the chain won’t grow more than 75GB a year. However, we have some ace up our sleeve: block chain checkpointing.
Checkpointing basically means rebooting the block chain periodically using a new genesis block that replicates the state of the system (balances, reputation scores, etc.) just before the checkpoint. In that way, as the chain gets a predictable maximum length, the block size limits can be lifted, and the throughput of the network is raised without compromising the long-term viability of full nodes.
