YBB ChainXplore : Crypto Geeks Share Web3 Winterisation Guide
Author: YBB Capital Researcher Ac-Core
Word count: This article is over 7000
Foreword
On the 5th of July, the drizzly weather hid a lukewarm crypto market, and in the rainy weather, the YBB ChainXplore: Geek Symposium 01 event came to a successful conclusion. We were honoured to have invited a number of heavyweight guests — senior technologists and founders who are dedicated to solving today’s pressing industry issues — to have a face-to-face exchange with us.
At the event, guests shared their views on how to secure funds and prevent hacking; where developers can get cloud-based API services; how to find efficient and reliable RPC services that meet their needs; and what scalable cross-chain interoperability protocols based on MPC, ZKP, and TEE are, among other issues. Here, let’s find out what sparks the geeks from different research directions collided with.
Different Perspectives on the Crypto Winter
2022 was a long-dormant bear market, and with the end of the epidemic in 2023, we were expecting market conditions to improve, but with more than a few interest rate hikes by the US dollar, as well as due to the SEC’s recent treatment of trading, what was a promising year has become less certain again. As industry seniors, we’ve all been around the industry for a few bulls and bears, so how do we all feel about the future of the industry? And how can each of us standing in our own field carry through this ‘winter’?” The host at the beginning of the event, YBB Capital Co-Creator John, asked the guests, to share how they have survived the winter. Below are the core views of the guests.
YBB Capital Co-Founder Hugh: In the last bull market cycle from the end of 20 to the end of 22 years, we can see that market capital and technological development of the two are positively correlated, there is the intervention of capital will lead to the development of a new narrative, for example, the last round of grey and other large capital entry brought the bull market more upward growth space, and later with the tightening of macro policy, the market was pumped out of part of the liquidity, past every round of bulls and bears change like a gear is a certain cycle in it. About Crypto more or need to pay attention to the development of technology and breakthroughs, so as to drive the entry of large funds. From the last EDCON live meeting in Montenegro, we are more concerned about the breakthrough of ZK technology and the mutual combination of AI and blockchain, and on the topic of AI we are all surrendering as a whole, thinking that AI will rule the world and maintaining a pessimistic attitude, but the overall feeling is still very interesting, with different ideas colliding with each other, and in general we are looking for a new round of narratives to drive the development of a new round of the bull market. a new round of bulls.
Joshua, Investment Manager at Kernel Ventures: After the release of the compliance policy in Hong Kong in April this year, because of the consideration of the liquidity factor, there is a greater need to move closer to compliance, and liquidity is also a very favourable factor at the level of the Exchange’s category management, and in general the liquidity and hotness of the project itself is still more important. From the perspective of VC primary investment, although we do not have a high frequency now, we are also looking for projects that we can co-operate with, including providing product suggestions for project parties, liquidity of assets at the product level, and docking of key resources, so as to provide some value to the project, which is also something we can do for the industry at the moment.
Albert He, Cheif Scientist of BlockPI: For individuals, how should they carry through this bear market? My advice is not to get on leverage, and when financing a project, the first thing the project owner should do is to think about how to traverse the bulls and bears and prepare for the bear market. To improve the operational ability in cost control and customer acquisition, try to ensure that the project can last long enough in the bear market. Regarding the big market market, looking back at the first few bull and bear cycles, it’s not hard to find that they were all driven by mainstream coins, but the current volume of bitcoin and ethereum is not small anymore, and the next round of the bull market will definitely have to have a few compliance aspects, such as BlackRock’s ETH application and the US dollar’s interest rate hike is expected to be clear that there is a turning point in time, and only after that will the funds turn to the cryptocurrency sector.
Rooch Network HaichaoZ: At present, the primary market is still in a cool period, what can be felt is that the current market is inclined to be impetuous, and a strange phenomenon has also appeared. A project may not have its outstanding innovation points, but as long as it is coupled with attributes such as ZK, Layer2, EVM, GameFi, etc., and at least 10W or more user volume, it is easy to get the favour of VCs. But we will stick to the path of building a good infrastructure for the industry, and contribute to the industry in a down-to-earth way that we are good at.
YBB Capital Co-Founder Hugh: We can now also feel that there is a polarisation in the current market, it is difficult for VCs to invest in good projects, and VCs are afraid to invest in grounded projects with even lower valuations. At present, most of the investment is carried by the market sentiment, but at present from the A16z and other large institutions of the investment results performance, most of the projects are broken. But we still need to be more optimistic to look at the current market, continue to hold the passion to study whether there will be new technological breakthroughs to drive market development.
Zhengxue Dai, Head of Development Relations at Chainbase: My perspective may be a bit different from everyone else’s. I think the winter has not yet arrived, and now we are facing a global recession and a structural reduction in the domestic population, so why are many people reducing their investments in the primary market? In addition, we can also see that the number of developers is still increasing, jokingly speaking, I may wait for the day I want to leave this industry, maybe the winter is really over. We will pay attention to the number of developers on the chain and the number of contracts deployed, from the existing number compared with last year is greatly reduced, and now most public chains want to hoard a group of developers. Despite the fact that Layer2 has a very large TVL, the vast majority of them are wool-gathering users and are not contributing to the ecosystem, so I’d like to throw out a question to you all, where do you think all the developers are at the moment.
BlockSec Co-Founder YaJin Zhou: Where are the developers of Web3? We have also been thinking about this issue, because our service object is mainly the project side. This is actually a chicken and egg problem, the developers make the project is still essentially for the user, there is a user to have demand, there is demand to have projects, there are projects to have developers. At present there is no particularly good Web3 application scenarios before the landing, a large number of users flock to Web3 is unrealistic. So the question comes back to how to get more users in, thinking about what needs Web3 solves in the end. Now in the context of the bear market, what kind of application to bring users in, this issue I am still more optimistic, with the current market to eliminate some bad projects, such as in the case of centralised exchanges continue to mine, more funds flow into the decentralised exchanges, in this process so that we are all in a stage of accumulation, experienced precipitation in order to have a better product out.
Source: live shooting
Dark Jungle and Knight of Light
According to the latest statistics from Slow Mist Hacked.slowmist on 8 July 23, as of January 2012, the total amount of losses due to hacking in the blockchain space has exceeded $30 billion, with 1,101 total hacking incidents!
No matter what capacity we are in Web3, we can hardly escape from the dark law of the jungle. Compared to Web2, the decentralised Web3 network loses some of its security to a certain extent, and similar to the logic of Ether Layer2 that provides scalability, Web3 needs the Knights of Light to extend the security of the network.
Data sources:Hacked
Data sources:Hacked
Security guards for users and project parties
There is a biggest pain point in the current industry — security. Among the many types of assets stolen, user wallets, project parties, and cross-chain bridges are the three most vulnerable to hacking, and in order to reduce the frequency of attacks, YBB Capital invited the contract security audit programme — BlockSec and the decentralised signature cross-chain bridge programme — Bool Network to share their solutions in the field of security with the guests at the event. BlockSec and Bool Network, a decentralised signature cross-chain bridge solution, to share their solutions in the security field with guests at the event.
Photo credit: BlockSec official
BlockSec is a blockchain security service team, as a security solution for blockchain developers, BlockSec can provide 24/7 security services from pre-deployment (e.g. code auditing) to post-deployment (e.g. dynamic alerts), BlockSec’s security monitoring and attack blocking technology has been widely recognised by the community, and has been partnered with a number of mainstream project partners, including Compound to develop an attack monitoring system for Compound V3 contracts. BlockSec’s security monitoring and attack blocking technology has been widely recognised by the community and has led to a number of partnerships with major project developers, including a recent partnership with Compound to develop an attack monitoring system for Compound V3 contracts. MetaDock and MetaSleuth, a money tracing tool.
Enhanced security additions beyond code auditing
Transaction Explorer: Phalcon Explore
Phalcon Explore is a proactive threat defence system based on BlockSec’s development of a suite of security developments for the DeFi project. BlockSec believes that code auditing alone cannot solve the Web3 security problem, so Phalcon was born to provide a new security paradigm, providing asset security for every user from the source browser portal. Phalcon is a powerful browser. It is a powerful browser with active threat defence and a collaborative security model that uses the state of the home network for testing.
Image source: Phalcon official website
Web3 Security Toolkit MetaDock
MetaDock is a completely free browser extension that enhances the user experience with innovative features seamlessly integrated into blockchain browsers and Dapps, making it a highly efficient tool for every security researcher, data analyst and DeFi user. View the flow of funds to any address with a single click, understand the risk of NFT collections, provide clearer labelling and scoring for contract addresses, and more. It has now received a 5-star rating from Google Chrome and Firefox.
Image source: MetaDock official website
Money Tracing Tool: MetaSleuth
MetaSleuth is a cross-chain crypto asset visualisation and analysis tool, input the query wallet address can be queried in a visual way to the address related to the chain of asset transfer dynamics, but also “chain detectives” are currently using a very frequent tool to monitor all aspects of the chain of data direction.
Photo credit: MetaSleuth Official
New solution tackles another hard-hit area of hacking — cross-chaining
Bool Network is a licence-free, completely trustless and highly scalable cross-chain interoperability protocol based on Multi-Party Computing (MPC), Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) and Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). It proposes a decentralised signature scheme to facilitate arbitrary messaging across heterogeneous networks and digital asset
Technology Architecture
Photo credit: Bool Network official
The most central part of the cross-chain is the repeater, but at present the safe and decentralised repeater is not achieved, so most of the hacker attacks in the current network are mainly cross-chain bridge attacks. Because most of the cross-chain repeaters are controlled in a centralised mode, the root cause is the incorrect management of the private key. For example, we are familiar with traditional solutions such as multi-signature or MPC, but unfortunately they still cannot solve the fundamental security problems, while Bool Network adopts the consensus algorithm mechanism of maintaining decentralised ledger NPoS to solve such problems.
To this end, Bool Network has developed the important concept of “Dynamic Hidden Committees”, where each committee actually manages a private key on a specific blockchain to perform any kind of cross-chain transactions and messaging. The Network also proposes its original Ring Verifiable Random Function (Ring VRF) election algorithm to ensure the privacy of committee membership. Notably, all committee procedures run in TEE to guarantee the confidentiality and integrity of the related components.
Photo credit: Bool Network official
- MPC: Allows data holders to achieve collaborative computation of data and output of results without trusting each other. Unlike multi-signature, MPC removes the notion of a single private key and requires the verifiers to jointly form a private key to complete the transaction verification.
- ZKP: It provides a unique and secure verification method based on Ring Verifiable Random Functions (Ring VRF) to hide the real public key of a VRF in a ring structure, so that its prover can show the verifier the ownership of a certain public key corresponding to a private key through the non-interactive ZKP technique without revealing the private information.
- TEE: An area in the CPU of a mobile device that guarantees computing privacy and security. It exists as an isolated environment in the Bool Network network. TEE not only stores sensitive data, but also verifies the correctness of computation, and the verifier needs to store the core code of Bool Network in it to ensure security.
Photo credit: Bool Network official
In the initialisation phase of the committee, we assume that 21 nodes are randomly selected from 10,000 TEE nodes. Firstly, the private key controlled by the committee is divided into 21 pieces by DKG algorithm, and then the private key fragments are encrypted and stored by trusted hardware, so that even malicious nodes are unable to obtain the real private key fragments, which kills the evil thoughts from the root. In this process, Ring VRF protocol is used to hide the real identities of these committee members, preventing internal collusion and increasing the cost of external attacks. This prevents internal collusion and increases the cost of an external attack, as an external hacker would need to find 21 selected hidden committee members out of a total of 10,000 nodes.
Photo credit: Bool Network official
Finally, the demand for data signatures is realised through secure multiparty computation techniques based on private key fragments, which have the distinct property of being able to complete signatures even if some of the nodes are abnormally offline. In addition, Bool defines a fixed time period called “epoch”. For a set of selected nodes, they can only control a committee with each other during an epoch. After an epoch, their management of a committee is handed over to a new group of nodes. And this process is facilitated by our Ring VRF algorithm to improve the security of the private keys managed by committees.
Bool Network is a secure underlying infrastructure for private key management.
Bool Network is the industry’s infrastructure, a service proposed to maintain the security of cross-chain communications, such as managing the private keys of endpoints in DeFi bridging applications built on top of Bool Network. In addition, Bool Network is scalable to provide consensus for off-chain committees, such as prophecy machine services that operate in a more decentralised model.
Photo credit: Bool Network official
To summarise, Bool Network is different from other cross-chain protocols in that it has full composability to enable arbitrary messaging between heterogeneous blockchains through Ring VRF for dynamic privacy committees to manage private keys. It is worth mentioning that the academic research of Bool Network has been accepted by the journal IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS). Bool Network has also been selected for the first Substrate Developer Competition organised by Parity and the first Web3 bootcamp for the Wanxiang Blockchain, and the team plans to support many more blockchain networks in the future.
Right now the product is available for BLS, EVM, Solana, Filecoin and others. The team also plans to provide security solutions for wallets and asset management platforms. In the third quarter of 2023, more than 10,000 nodes are expected to be running in the Bool Network, and the more nodes supported, the more secure and decentralised the network will become.
RPC services that accelerate developer efficiency
Technically, a blockchain node is a high-performance computer or server, which is a computer connected to each other’s decentralised network and is responsible for storing and updating blockchain data. In layman’s terms, the blockchain protocol is like EVM for Ether and Bitcoin for Bitcoin. When you run EVM on your computer, you are a node, but there are different kinds of nodes.
RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) is a protocol for Remote Procedure Calls (RPC), an RPC service that runs a blockchain node client on a server that provides an http or websocket interface via DNS domain name resolution.
Source: BlockPI official website
Technical Architecture:
BlockPI Network is a blockchain infrastructure project, and its technical architecture is mainly composed of five parts, namely BlockPI Hub, HyperNode, Gateway, FisherMan, and Validator, which are complementary to each other and together constitute the complete network of BlockPI Network.
(1) BlockPI Hub
BlockPI Hub is a collection of user management system, node rating, authenticator system and account system. In addition to this, user registration information, account information and KYC information are all stored here. Not only that it has been testing the nodes in the network and these are a source of reference data for BlockPI Load Balancer. The income and expenditure of the whole network, as well as issuing rewards to the roles in the system are all done in the Hub, which accounts for the heavier part of the whole system.
(2) Gateway
The Gateway is responsible for collecting and classifying user requests and routing them to the appropriate HyperNode by the BlockPI load balancer. the load balancer in the Gateway evaluates the health of the back-end HyperNode nodes in real time and distributes the workload so that the entire network is in an optimal service state.
(3) HyperNode
HyperNode is the end node that handles RPC requests and sends responses to users through the Gateway.HyperNode usually runs together with the full node of the target blockchain (the target of RPC requests). Officially, the decentralised architecture was validated during the test network phase by opening up third-party operators to join HyperNode and run nodes. 24 blockchain networks are now supported.
(4) Validator
Validator is an independent blockchain node that acts as a “police” to monitor the entire network. Using a verifiable random algorithm, the Validator verifies workload data from the HyperNode and Gateway and writes the results to the block. Through the consensus protocol this data is also verified and recorded by other Validators, serving to record and verify each other.
(5) FisherMan
FisherMan is another role responsible for network security, and Validtor is also a special role. It sends RPC requests to HyperNodes and Gateways in the guise of Gateway and User and compares the results, and reports the problematic comparison results.
Source: BlockPI Official
Winter and Prospects
Since its inception, the blockchain industry has been attracting every new member with its unique charm, and no matter how we participate in it, we will eventually move forward with faith. Although the industry is still in the early stage of development, there are many imperfect technical vacancies, but we firmly believe that if the Internet changes the world again in the future, the blockchain technology will be the first to show its head.
Regardless of whether we are in winter or summer, the development of the industry cannot be separated from the construction and innovation of every developer. YBB Capital always adheres to the logic of value investment with technology development as the core, and continuously provides financing assistance to outstanding projects. We believe that the development of blockchain needs to rely on its own technological breakthroughs to create a larger and better market environment, and finally, we are honoured to work with all the outstanding developers and builders to “add bricks and mortar” to the blockchain cause, and rely on technological innovation to solve the problems of market demand. Whether we are developers or investors, we are all pioneers at the forefront of the times. Finally, I sincerely thank all the guests present.
Source: YBB Capital
About YBB
YBB is a web3 fund dedicating itself to identify Web3-defining projects with a vision to create a better online habitat for all internet residents. Founded by a group of blockchain believers who have been actively participated in this industry since 2013, YBB is always willing to help early-stage projects to evolve from 0 to 1.We value innovation, self-driven passion, and user-oriented products while recognizing the potential of cryptos and blockchain applications.
