Expansion, developer friendliness, ease of use, what are the core competitiveness of the public chain?

As the most critical infrastructure in the encryption industry, public chain technology has always been the focus of attention. Previously, CT Chinese had already discussed in "After the outbreak of the public chain sector, what other public chains deserve our attention and participation?" " In the article, the four public chains of Fantom, Cardano, Terra and Waves are explained in detail.

However, the popularity of the public chain market is far beyond our imagination. Next, this article will continue to introduce you to more public chain projects that deserve our attention.

Near: A public chain with unlimited horizontal expansion through sharding technology

Near is an open-source platform that empowers creators, communities, and marketplaces to drive a more open, connected, and consumer-friendly world. Near can provide us with a high enough security to help users manage high-value assets such as currency, identity or non-fungible tokens. At the same time, Near's performance is strong enough to ensure that assets such as currency are easy to use for users, and users can easily and freely use the power of the open network provided by Near.

The above is Near's positioning for itself.

From a technical point of view, Near is a PoS (Proof of Stake) public chain that uses sharding technology. The Near team has built one of the few large-scale sharding database systems in the world, and has been recognized by top investors in the encryption industry. Therefore, in the construction of the blockchain, Near pays more attention to practice rather than theory and academics.

It’s worth noting that Near is open source, and anyone can participate in Near and develop decentralized applications or run the network as a node. The Near Foundation, which promoted the development of the Near ecosystem in the early days, is a non-profit organization dedicated to building an ecosystem around the Near network.

The Near team believes that sharding is a very complex technology, and the road to building the Near sharding blockchain needs to be promoted step by step to grow with the level of ecological users. Therefore, the Near team designed four stages for the development of the Near blockchain:

Phase 0 (phase 0): Simplified version of Yeying protocol - improving network throughput;

Phase 1 (phase 1): chunk-only producer - to further improve the level of network decentralization;

The second phase (phase 2): Night Shadow Protocol - lowering the threshold for validating nodes;

The third phase (phase 3): dynamic re-sharding - unlimited expansion;

Now, Near is about to release a simplified version of the Yeying protocol in November this year, completing phase 0 (phase 0) to increase the throughput of the network. It is worth mentioning that, unlike Layer 2's vertical expansion, sharding is horizontal expansion, which supports unlimited expansion to capture more user value. Due to this feature, Near is also known as the future Ethereum 2.0.

At the same time, Near has also done considerable research on cross-chain technology, and launched the Ethereum-Near cross-chain Rainbow Bridge to achieve interoperability. With Rainbow Bridge, we can seamlessly transfer assets between Ethereum and Near.

The cross-chain of the Rainbow Bridge is done through the cooperation of two light clients that can track the state of the chain without a lot of calculations. One is built on Ethereum as an Ethereum contract and the other is built on Near as a Near contract. Two light clients will verify their tracked state in a trustless manner. After the finality is confirmed, the data will be transferred to the Ethereum/Near chain through the relay layer. Near hopes to help more Ethereum ecological users transfer assets to the Near blockchain through decentralized cross-chain means.

At present, Near has successfully built cross-chain bridges such as ETH-NEAR and Filecoin-NEAR. The BSC-NEAR cross-chain bridge is running well on the test network and will be launched soon in the future.

On September 24th, the Near MetaBUIDL Hackathon came to a successful conclusion. 1,677 teams and individuals registered to participate, and finally received valid submissions from 85 teams. It can be seen that the projects on the Near chain have fully bloomed, covering multiple tracks, and jointly promoting the development of Near.

Being developer-friendly is also one of Near's strengths. Aurora is the Ethereum virtual machine launched by Near, hoping to provide developers with a high-performance platform to help them enjoy the high throughput, scalability, security and low transaction costs of Near while being compatible with Ethereum. The Aurora transaction fee is ETH, which is autonomous by the Aurora DAO.

In order to seamlessly connect Ethereum, as part of the Rainbow Bridge, Aurora Bridge is the only completely trustless asset cross-chain bridge in Ethereum.

For Aurora, DODO co-founder Diane Dai believes:

Aurora's implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine on the NEAR protocol greatly expands the horizons of cross-chain functionality, further expanding the multi-chain space, and providing more access and liquidity to people around the world.

Dfinity: Committed to building a public chain for the decentralized Internet

Dfinity's original idea was to solve some of the shortcomings of Ethereum, and extend the DeFi ecosystem opened by Ethereum to a wide range of commercial application scenarios by building an open virtual blockchain computer and technology. Thus, the Internet Computer was built.

Internet Computer extends the Internet through protocols developed by Dfinity that unite independent data centers, enabling the Internet itself to become a cloud and providing an open platform for hosting software, services and data. In fact, we can understand it as a supercomputer, which is a virtualized product of countless computers running the ICP protocol, compatible with decentralization, security and high performance.

From an architectural standpoint, Internet Computer is a blockchain that runs at network speeds and has unlimited capacity. Its hierarchical structure can be divided into data centers (Data Centers), nodes (Nodes), subnets (Subnets) and software containers (Canisters) from bottom to top.

The data center is the bottom layer, responsible for the management and operation of nodes. Nodes are responsible for processing data and state execution. Nodes maintain subnets, which house software containers. Software containers can implement various functions of various decentralized applications in the Dfinity ecosystem, which we can understand as smart contracts.

Each data center can run multiple nodes. Multiple nodes collectively run subnets that can house multiple software containers.

According to ic.rocks data , the number of Dfinity nodes has risen from a dozen in June to 291 today.

Currently, the Dfinity network has 21 subnets, 291 nodes, and 8399 software containers.

The moat for the development of the public chain is its ecological prosperity, so we can also see the support of the public chain for developers. The convenience of Dfinity for developers lies in the reduction of workload and cost. Someone gave an example that building a Facebook application required 62 million lines of code, while CanCan (a decentralized Douyin) developed based on Dfinity only used less than 1,000 lines of code.

At the same time, like Solana and Near, Dfinity is also actively carrying out hackathon activities, and the Dfinity Foundation has also been actively carrying out developer funding programs, with more than 60 projects receiving funding.

However, unlike other public chains, Dfinity's development focus is not on DeFi and NFT, but on the social field. The DSCVR, OpenChat and Distrikt projects on it can correspond to the traditional Internet applications Reddit, WhatsApp and LinkedIn respectively. These are the projects that the Dfinity Foundation focuses on.

Herbert, head of Dfinity China, said:

Dfinity hopes that developers will come out of the traditional blockchain and make something different, which can truly benchmark traditional Internet industry applications, such as social media and games. In terms of games, DFINITY launched the Internet computer in May this year. Many developers have moved all the Nintendo games they liked when they were young to the Internet computer; in terms of social media, we hope to see more apps using Tamper-proof to protect consumers’ personal data. In addition, I also hope to see the application of Social media enterprise-level SaaS.

Different from many public chain visions, Dfinity hopes to open the door to Web3.0 for us by creating social and other traditional Internet applications in the decentralized world. However, if Dfinity wants to gain more favor from the encryption market in the future, it also needs to vigorously develop its DeFi ecosystem.

It is worth noting that Dfinity does not have the concept of cross-chain. In the future, Dfinity hopes to provide smart contract services for the Bitcoin network by integrating with the Bitcoin blockchain. For Ethereum, Dfinity has done a more complex integration - using technology to complete the signature of the Ethereum smart contract on the IC, and in turn running Ethereum in the IC node for two-way interaction.

Mina: A lightweight public chain using recursive zero-knowledge proof

Mina is the first cryptocurrency protocol with a concise blockchain. Mina uses advanced cryptography and recursive zero-knowledge proof zk-SNARKs to design a complete blockchain, keeping its size around 22KB (about the size of a few tweets), and verifying the current blockchain state speed extremely fast.

As we all know, the data stored in the traditional blockchain is complicated. Let’s take Ethereum as an example. According to data from etherscan.io , the storage data scale of the full node GETH of Ethereum has reached 985GB, which is close to 1 TB. In October last year, GETH's storage data size was only about 500GB. With the increase in the adoption of Ethereum, it took only one year for the full node data of Ethereum to double. In the future, with the expansion of the DeFi ecosystem, Ethereum will store more and more data.

At this point we will face two problems:

Full nodes can only participate in verifying transactions and generating blocks only by storing all state data on the chain;

Users can only verify the correctness of the chain by downloading the data of the entire chain;

In the future, this data scale will become more and more heavy, restricting the development of the blockchain. Mina hopes to maintain the blockchain size at around 22KB through zk-SNARK zero-knowledge proof technology. The current zero-knowledge proof technology is mainly applied to private transactions, Layer 2 and other tracks, and Mina uses it for block packaging and verification of network status.

To put it simply, zk-SNARK zero-knowledge proof allows us to convince the verifier that your information is correct without providing key information to the verifier. For example, we need to enter a password when logging in. Zero-knowledge proof allows us to make the verifier think that the password is correct and agree to log in without revealing the password.

Mina separates block production and transaction verification, and reduces the hardware cost of becoming a public chain verification node by lowering the threshold. 22KB means that we only need a mobile phone or a computer to easily verify the blockchain status and become a Mina node. As long as the verification calculation result is executed correctly, we do not need to prove the entire calculation process to quickly verify the state of the blockchain.

Therefore, if the threshold is low enough, the number of nodes will be large enough. The Mina blockchain will become sufficiently distributed and decentralized during the development process. At the same time, thanks to the zero-knowledge proof technology, transactions on Mina are private.

Alternatively, Snapps is a zero-knowledge proof-powered application by Mian. Snapps can access any website through a private gateway and use verified real-world data online. Therefore, without compromising privacy, developers can use real-world information for analysis and decision-making, and better provide us with convenient blockchain services.

It is worth noting that the current Mina network TPS is not high. The team explained it as:

The current TPS of the Mina network is not high, on the one hand, because it is in the early stage of the ecology, and the demand for transaction transfers is small; on the other hand, in order to ensure the stability of the network, the number of nodes has not been rapidly expanded. TPS is not a problem and can be adjusted according to later needs.

I believe that in the future, Mina will continue to lower the threshold for us to step from Web2.0 to Web3.0, and provide us with more Web3.0 services without sacrificing ease of use and decentralization.

Avalanche: The Innovator of the Consensus Protocol

Avalanche is an open-source blockchain platform for enabling highly decentralized applications, new financial native ecosystems, and new interoperable operating systems.

In the past few months, the price and TVL of Avalanche's native tokens have risen rapidly, which has aroused a new round of attention in the encryption market. It aims to solve the limitations of the old blockchain platform, including slow transaction speed, low scalability and insufficient decentralization.

Avalanche's performance improvement is based on the following two aspects:

The third-generation consensus mechanism launched by combining the advantages of Nakamoto consensus and classic consensus - Avalanche's unique snow series protocol is famous for its low latency, high throughput and theoretical security threshold of 80%. According to official data, Avalanche TPS has exceeded 4500 and can complete transactions within two seconds . Like Fantom, Avalanche also optimizes the proof-of-stake protocol by adopting DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) ;

Avalanche's unique three-chain architecture - X (Exchange transaction), P (Platform platform), C (Contract contract) chain;

The functions of the three chains are different.

The X chain is mainly responsible for creating and trading digital assets, and users can deposit and withdraw assets from the exchange. Our cross-chain behavior is also done through the X chain. The launch of Avalanche Bridge is also based on the X chain. Launched on July 29 this year, the Avalanche Bridge cross-chain bridge is built with Intel SGX Enclave technology.

The C chain is mainly responsible for the development, deployment and interaction of smart contracts. Because it is compatible with multiple virtual machines, including EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), developers can easily deploy smart contracts on the C chain, and developers on other chains can also easily clone their applications to Avalanche. This is why Avalanche is called a developer-friendly public chain.

The P chain is the core of Avalanche, responsible for node pledge and network verification, and is the basis of the C chain and X chain. We can also create subnets through P-chains. The subnet can be customized, we can formulate the usage rules of the subnet through code, and we can even use other tokens as the gas fee carrier in the subnet. Therefore, the extremely high customizability makes Avalanche popular among enterprise users.

The intercommunication of the three chains is completed by Cross Chain. Cross Chain can easily help users freely operate in the X, P, and C chains.

Thanks to the good fundamentals, the Avalanche ecosystem has also achieved good development this year. According to DeFi Llama data, the TVL (total locked value) on the Avalanche chain has exceeded 3.7 billion US dollars, ranking sixth.

According to statistics from Avalanche's official website , there are currently 52 DeFi projects in the Avalanche ecosystem. With a small number of projects, a large amount of ecological value is captured, and we can also see the popularity of Avalanche in the market. Among them, the lending agreement Benqi TVL (total locked value) is the highest, accounting for nearly 50% of the market.

epilogue

In fact, after observing so many public chains, we can also summarize some rules:

There are no more than three technical directions adopted by the public chain: performance, scalability and ease of use;

Ethereum is a well-deserved top-tier public chain, and all latecomers hope to capture the overflow value of Ethereum through high performance and scalability.

Cross-chain is a very important link. Only a convenient and fast cross-chain bridge can enable the public chain ecology to better capture the value from the outside world;

Developers are the foundation of the development of the public chain. If the public chain ecology wants to develop, it needs the support and support of developers. Therefore, the public chain side is also actively holding activities such as hackathons to attract more developers to join the ecology;

Therefore, when we look at other latecomers in the public chain sector, we might as well look at these aspects, and perhaps have a new understanding of the technology and development of the public chain. As for what kind of technical features can help the public chain stand out from the competition, we don't know yet. But it is worth affirming that there will be more public chains and technologies with interesting ideas in the future, and they will go to the future with us while solving old problems.