Category: Network

Polygon Matic

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Polygon believes in Web3 for all.

Polygon is a decentralised Ethereum scaling platform that enables developers to build scalable user-friendly dApps with low transaction fees without ever sacrificing on security.

Polygon is a scaling solution for public blockchains.
Based on an adapted implementation of Plasma framework (Plasma MoreVP) – with an account based implementation (read more here), Polygon supports all the existing Ethereum tooling along with faster and cheaper transactions.

Polygon Network is a blockchain application platform that provides hybrid Proof-of-Stake and Plasma-enabled sidechains.

Architecturally, the beauty of Polygon is its elegant design, which features a generic validation layer separated from varying execution environments like Plasma enabled chains, full blown EVM sidechains, and in the future, other Layer 2 approaches such as Optimistic Rollups.

Currently, developers can use Plasma for specific state transitions for which Plasma predicates have been written such as ERC20, ERC721, asset swaps or other custom predicates.
For arbitrary state transitions, they can use PoS. Or both! This is made possible by Polygon’s hybrid construction.

To enable the PoS mechanism on our platform, a set of staking management contracts are deployed on Ethereum, as well as a set of incentivized validators running Heimdall and Bor nodes.

Ethereum is the first basechain Polygon supports, but Polygon intends to offer support for additional basechains, based on community suggestions and consensus, to enable an interoperable decentralized Layer 2 blockchain platform.

Polygon has a three-layer architecture:

Staking and Plasma smart contracts on Ethereum
Heimdall (Proof of Stake layer)
Bor (Block producer layer)

Polygon smart contracts (on Ethereum)

Polygon maintains a set of smart contracts on Ethereum, which handle the following:

Staking management for the Proof-of-Stake layer
Delegation management including validator shares
Plasma contracts for MoreVP, including checkpoints/snapshots of sidechain state

Heimdall (Proof-of-Stake validator layer)

Heimdall is the PoS validator node that works in consonance with the Staking contracts on Ethereum to enable the PoS mechanism on Polygon. We have implemented this by building on top of the Tendermint consensus engine with changes to the signature scheme and various data structures. It is responsible for block validation, block producer committee selection, checkpointing a representation of the sidechain blocks to Ethereum in our architecture and various other responsibilities.

Heimdall layer handles the aggregation of blocks produced by Bor into a merkle tree and publishing the merkle root periodically to the root chain. This periodic publishing are called checkpoints.
For every few blocks on Bor, a validator (on the Heimdall layer):

Validates all the blocks since the last checkpoint
Creates a merkle tree of the block hashes
Publishes the merkle root to the main chain

Checkpoints are important for two reasons:

Providing finality on the Root Chain
Providing proof of burn in withdrawal of assets

A bird’s eye view of the process can be explained as:

A subset of active validators from the pool are selected to act as block producers for a span. The Selection of each span will also be consented by at least 2/3 in power. These block producers are responsible for creating blocks and broadcasting it to the remaining of the network.
A checkpoint includes the root of all blocks created during any given interval. All nodes validate the same and attach their signature to it.
A selected proposer from the validator set is responsible for collecting all signatures for a particular checkpoint and committing the same on the main-chain.
The responsibility of creating blocks and also proposing checkpoints is variably dependent on a validator’s stake ratio in the overall pool.

Bor (Block Producer Layer)

Bor is Polygon block producer layer – the entity responsible for aggregating transactions into blocks.

Block producers are periodically shuffled via committee selection on Heimdall in durations termed as a span in Polygon. Blocks are produced at the Bor node and the sidechain VM is EVM-compatible. Blocks produced on Bor are also validated periodically by Heimdall nodes, and a checkpoint consisting of the Merkle tree hash of a set of blocks on Bor is committed to Ethereum periodically.

How is Polygon different from other implementations of Plasma?

Polygon’s implementation of Plasma is built on state-based side chains which run on EVM, while the other implementations of Plasma primarily use UTXOs which restricts them to being payment specific.
Having state based side chains allows Polygon to provide scalability for generic smart contracts as well.

Secondly, Polygon uses a public checkpointing layer which publishes checkpoints after periodic intervals (unlike checkpoints after every block in Plasma Cash) allowing the side chains to operate at high speeds while publishing the checkpoints in batches.

These checkpoints along with the fraud proofs ensure that Polygon’s side chains operate in a secure manner and any fraudulent activity can be detected on Ethereum mainchain and be penalized by slashing the stakes of the bad actors.
This mainchain security is supplementary to the PoS protocol security on the side chains.

📜Resources

📎 Bor Architecture: https://forum.matic.network/t/matic-system-overview-bor/126
📎 Heimdall Architecture: https://forum.matic.network/t/matic-system-overview-heimdall/125
📎 Checkpoint Mechanism: https://forum.matic.network/t/checkpoint-mechanism-on-heimdall/127

Tags avainu, blockchain, Chain, Matic, network, polygon

Network

Injective Protocol

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Injective Protocol is a fully decentralized layer-2 DEX protocol built for the next generation of decentralized derivatives exchange.

The Injective Chain is a Tendermint-based IBC-compatible blockchain which supports a decentralized orderbook-based DEX protocol and a trustless ERC-20 token bridge to the Ethereum blockchain.

It is the first layer-2 fully decentralized exchange protocol for decentralized perpetual swaps, futures, and spot trading that unlocks the full potential of decentralized derivatives and borderless DeFi. Every component of the protocol has been built to be fully trustless, censorship-resistant, publicly verifiable, and front-running resistant.

By providing the unrestricted and unprecedented ability to express diverse views in the decentralized financial markets, we are striving to empower individuals with the ability to more efficiently allocate capital in our society.

Key Features & Highlights

Fully Decentralized: Injective transforms an exchange into a decentralized public utility by open-sourcing every single component of the exchange, from the front-end exchange interface to back-end infrastructure to orderbook liquidity.
Permissionless: Full decentralization turns the traditional business model of an exchange on its head, as we eliminate the technical barrier to entry for users by creating a permissionless and highly performant exchange for both spot and derivatives markets.
Censorship Resistant: Full decentralization combined with permissionless access ensures an open and unrestricted market, resistant to censorship.
Community Owned: Nodes on the Injective Chain are incentivized through token economics to act as order relayers, host a decentralized orderbook, and serve as a decentralized trade execution coordinator.
Scalable: Injective brings an order of magnitude speedup by scaling trade execution and settlement on layer-2.

Injective Protocol’s infrastructure is comprised of three principal components:

Injective Chain
Injective Exchange Service
Injective Ethereum Bridge

Injective Chain

The Injective Chain is a layer-2 sidechain and Cosmos Zone connected to Ethereum.
The chain itself is built on top of Tendermint and allows for the transferring and trading of Ethereum-based assets on the Injective Chain.

The Injective Chain’s primary purpose is to power the Injective Exchange protocol, which is a decentralized peer-to-peer spot and derivatives exchange protocol. The protocol allows individuals to create and trade on arbitrary derivative markets.

Injective Exchange Service

Unlike traditional exchanges which serve as gatekeepers to the crypto industry, Injective transforms an exchange into a decentralized public utility. What truly differentiates Injective is that we bring every component of a decentralized exchange to the public. Everything — from the front-end exchange interface to back-end infrastructure to orderbook liquidity — is provided openly and for free.
This transforms the traditional business model of exchanges as we eliminate the technical barrier to entry for individuals to freely run a highly performative exchange.

Injective’s model rewards relayers in the Injective network for sourcing liquidity. By doing so, exchange providers are incentivized to better serve users as they compete amongst each other to provide better user experiences. Thus, this allows users from all around the world to access decentralized financial markets.

Injective Chain

The Injective Chain is the core backbone for Injective’s layer-2 derivatives platform.

Beyond the standard imported modules from the Cosmos-SDK, the Injective chain itself is comprised of 5 unique modules:

auction
exchange
insurance
oracle

peggy

Injective Accounts

Injective defines its own custom Account type that uses Ethereum’s ECDSA secp256k1 curve for keys. This satisfies the EIP84 for full BIP44 paths. The root HD path for Injective-based accounts is m/44'/60'/0'/0.

Addresses and Public Keys

There are 3 main types of Addresses/PubKeys available by default on Injective:

Addresses and Keys for accounts, which identify users (e.g. the sender of a message). They are derived using the eth_secp256k1 curve.
Addresses and Keys for validator operators, which identify the operators of validators. They are derived using the eth_secp256k1 curve.
Addresses and Keys for consensus nodes, which identify the validator nodes participating in consensus. They are derived using the ed25519 curve.

	Address bech32 Prefix	Pubkey bech32 Prefix	Curve	Address byte length	Pubkey byte length
Accounts	`inj`	`injpub`	`eth_secp256k1`	`20`	`33` (compressed)
Validator Operator	`injvaloper`	`injvaloperpub`	`eth_secp256k1`	`20`	`33` (compressed)
Consensus Nodes	`injvalcons`	`injvalconspub`	`ed25519`	`20`	`32`

Address formats for clients

EthAccounts can be represented in both Bech32 and hex format for Ethereum’s Web3 tooling compatibility.

The Bech32 format is the default format for Cosmos-SDK queries and transactions through CLI and REST clients. The hex format on the other hand, is the Ethereum common.Address representation of a Cosmos sdk.AccAddress.

Address (Bech32): inj14au322k9munkmx5wrchz9q30juf5wjgz2cfqku
Address (EIP55 Hex): 0xAF79152AC5dF276D9A8e1E2E22822f9713474902
Compressed Public Key: {"@type":"/injective.crypto.v1beta1.ethsecp256k1.PubKey","key":"ApNNebT58zlZxO2yjHiRTJ7a7ufjIzeq5HhLrbmtg9Y/"}

Tags avainu, blockchain, Chain, inj, network, protocol

Network

Avalanche

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Avalanche is an open-source platform for launching decentralized applications and enterprise blockchain deployments in one interoperable, highly scalable ecosystem. Avalanche is the first decentralized smart contracts platform built for the scale of global finance, with near-instant transaction finality. Ethereum developers can quickly build on Avalanche as Solidity works out-of-the-box.

A key difference between Avalanche and other decentralized networks is the consensus protocol. Over time, people have come to a false understanding that blockchains have to be slow and not scalable. The Avalanche protocol employs a novel approach to consensus to achieve its strong safety guarantees, quick finality, and high-throughput without compromising decentralization.

AVAX

AVAX is the native token of Avalanche. It’s a hard-capped, scarce asset that is used to pay for fees, secure the platform through staking, and provide a basic unit of account between the multiple subnets created on Avalanche. 1 nAVAX is equal to 0.000000001 AVAX.

Avalanche Consensus Protocol

Protocols in the Avalanche family operate through repeated sub-sampled voting. When a validator is determining whether a transaction should be accepted or rejected, it asks a small, random subset of validators whether they think the transaction should be accepted or rejected. If the queried validator thinks the transaction is invalid, has already rejected the transaction, or prefers a conflicting transaction, it replies that it thinks the transaction should be rejected. Otherwise, it replies that it thinks the transaction should be accepted.

If a sufficiently large portion (alpha α) of the validators sampled reply that they think the transaction should be accepted, the validator prefers to accept the transaction. That is, when it is queried about the transaction in the future, it will reply that it thinks the transaction should be accepted. Similarly, the validator will prefer to reject the transaction if a sufficiently large portion of the validators replies that they think the transaction should be rejected.

The validator repeats this sampling process until alpha of the validators queried reply the same way (accept or reject) for beta β consecutive rounds.

In the common case when a transaction has no conflicts, finalization happens very quickly. When conflicts exist, honest validators quickly cluster around conflicting transactions, entering a positive feedback loop until all correct validators prefer that transaction. This leads to the acceptance of non-conflicting transactions and the rejection of conflicting transactions.

It is guaranteed (with high probability based on system parameters) that if any honest validator accepts or rejects a transaction, all honest validators will accept or reject that transaction.

Learn more technical components of the Avalanche consensus protocol by reading the whitepaper.

Snowman Consensus Protocol

Snowman is a chain-optimized consensus protocol–high-throughput, totally-ordered, and great for smart contracts. Snowman is powered by the Avalanche consensus protocol. Both P-Chain and C-Chain implement the Snowman consensus protocol.

Key Features

Speed

Uses a novel consensus protocol, developed by a team of Cornell computer scientists, and is able to permanently confirm transactions in under 1 second.

Scalability

Capable of 4,500 transactions per second–an order of magnitude greater than existing blockchains.

Security

Ensures stronger security guarantees well-above the 51% standard of other networks.

Flexibility

Easily create custom blockchains and decentralized apps that contain almost any arbitrary logic.

Sustainability

Uses energy-efficient proof-of-stake consensus algorithm rather than proof-of-work.

Smart Contract Support

Supports the creation of Solidity smart contracts and your favorite Ethereum tools like Remix, Metamask, Truffle, and more.

Private and Public Blockchains

Create your own public or private blockchains.

Designed for Finance

Native support for easily creating and trading digital smart assets with complex, custom rulesets.

Avalanche Platform Overview

Avalanche features 3 built-in blockchains: Exchange Chain (X-Chain), Platform Chain (P-Chain), and Contract Chain (C-Chain). All 3 blockchains are validated and secured by the Primary Network. The Primary Network is a special subnet, and all members of all custom subnets must also be a member of the Primary Network by staking at least 2,000 AVAX.

Here are tutorials on creating a subnet and adding validators to a subnet.

Subnets

A subnet, or subnetwork, is a dynamic set of validators working together to achieve consensus on the state of a set of blockchains. Each blockchain is validated by exactly one subnet. A subnet can validate many blockchains. A node may be a member of many subnets.

A subnet manages its own membership, and it may require that its constituent validators have certain properties. This is very useful, and we explore its ramifications in more depth below:

Compliance

Avalanche’s subnet architecture makes regulatory compliance manageable. As mentioned above, a subnet may require validators to meet a set of requirements.

Some examples of requirements include:

Validators must be located in a given country
Validators must pass a KYC/AML checks
Validators must hold a certain license

(To be abundantly clear, the above examples are just that: examples. These requirements do not apply to the Avalanche Primary Network.)

Support for Private Blockchains

You can create a subnet where only certain pre-defined validators may join and create a private subnet where the contents of the blockchains would be visible only to those validators. This is ideal for organizations interested in keeping their information private.

Separation of Concerns

In a heterogeneous network of blockchains, some validators will not want to validate certain blockchains because they simply have no interest in those blockchains. The subnet model allows validators to only concern themselves with blockchains that they care about. This reduces the burden on validators.

Application-Specific Requirements

Different blockchain-based applications may require validators to have certain properties. Suppose there is an application that requires large amounts of RAM or CPU power. A Subnet could require that validators meet certain hardware requirements so that the application doesn’t suffer from low performance due to slow validators.

Virtual Machines

A Virtual Machine (VM) defines the application-level logic of a blockchain. In technical terms, it specifies the blockchain’s state, state transition function, transactions, and the API through which users can interact with the blockchain. Every blockchain on Avalanche is an instance of a VM.

When you write a VM, you don’t need to concern yourself with lower-level logic like networking, consensus, and the structure of the blockchain. Avalanche does this behind the scenes so you can focus on the thing you would like to build.

Think of a VM as a blueprint for a blockchain; you can use the same VM to create many blockchains, each of which follows the same ruleset but is logically independent of other blockchains.

Why Virtual Machines?

At first, blockchain networks had one Virtual Machine (VM) with a pre-defined, static set of functionality. This rigid, monolithic design limited what blockchain-based applications one could run on such networks.

People who wanted custom decentralized applications had to create their own, entirely new blockchain network from scratch. Doing so required a great deal of time and effort, offered limited security, and generally resulted in a bespoke, fragile blockchain that never got off the ground.

Ethereum made a step toward solving this problem with smart contracts. Developers didn’t need to worry about networking and consensus, but creating decentralized applications was still hard. The Ethereum VM has low performance and imposes restrictions on smart contract developers. Solidity and the other few languages for writing Ethereum smart contracts are unfamiliar to most programmers.

Avalanche VMs (AVMs) make it easy to define a blockchain-based decentralized application. Rather than new, limited languages like Solidity, developers can write VMs in Go (other languages will be supported in the future).

Creating Your Blockchain and Virtual Machine

Avalanche supports the creation of new instances of the Avalanche VM.

Avalanche also supports creating custom blockchains with virtual machines.

Exchange Chain (X-Chain)

The X-Chain acts as a decentralized platform for creating and trading digital smart assets, a representation of a real-world resource (e.g., equity, bonds) with a set of rules that govern its behavior, like “can’t be traded until tomorrow” or “can only be sent to US citizens.”

One asset traded on the X-Chain is AVAX. When you issue a transaction to a blockchain on Avalanche, you pay a fee denominated in AVAX.

The X-Chain is an instance of the Avalanche Virtual Machine (AVM). The X-Chain API allows clients to create and trade assets on the X-Chain and other instances of the AVM. See this for more details.

Platform Chain (P-Chain)

The P-Chain is the metadata blockchain on Avalanche and coordinates validators, keeps track of active subnets, and enables the creation of new subnets. The P-Chain implements the Snowman consensus protocol.

The P-Chain API allows clients to create subnets, add validators to subnets, and create blockchains.

Contract Chain (C-Chain)

The C-Chain allows for the creation smart contracts using the C-Chain’s API.

The C-Chain is an instance of the Ethereum Virtual Machine powered by Avalanche.

Tags avainu, avax, blockchain, network, protocol

Metaverse Network

Metus

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Metus is a community-run SocialFi Network, where each participant can easily monetize their data, and get rewarded for the activity.

With the growth of social networks to monetize their data has become increasingly difficult, and more and more users become just “silent” observers and “food” to their platforms.
Here we come to the part where we want to explain why Metus, as well as what is the purpose and application of this project?

Metus wants to solve this problem and give everyone a fair start and a wind in their backs, because every start is difficult and not everyone has the same conditions to start digital business.

This is the meaning and goal of this project, that everyone has the right and chance to realize their “ideas” altough this journey has many steps, they wanna to give each individual at least one step on that path, not a stumbling block.

For all those already experienced individuals, businesses and companies who want to skip a few steps, and get the desired results immediately, they will have customized features, where you can rent your advertising space, present your company, application, games etc. Games, VR, NFT, Metaverse (MetaFi) is still a relatively new economy, insufficiently researched and with a ∞ potential.

Metus comes with a lot of features, and already they are real refreshment in the crypto space.
Certainly, one of the projects to which special attention should be paid.

It is difficult to sum it all up in one article, so below are links, where you can explore and study the project yourself.
They offer comprehensive documentation, clear goals and high work ethic.
We love it!
WEBSITE
APP
DOCS

Tags metadao, mtd, P2E, socialfi