Whether it is EOS, which has recently attracted a lot of attention, or AE, which is considered to be undervalued, or Cardano, which ranks among the top 20 in market value after its launch; The outbreak of the chain war.

Since the birth of Ethereum in 2014, there have been many general-purpose underlying blockchain platforms that can incubate and build Dapps; so far, more than 50 related currencies have emerged. However, just like iOS and Android in the smartphone market, Ethereum occupies an absolute advantage in the number of Dapps; the number of applications tracked on DappRadar alone reaches 571, which is the second largest platform-type public chain - the number of Dapps recorded by NEO 11.6 times.

The incubation of a large number of Dapps requires a developer base and mature development tools. According to incomplete statistics from the blockchain software company ConsenSys, there are currently as many as 250,000 developers active on the Ethereum network, and its Truffle development framework was downloaded more than 200,000 times in a single month in October 2017. In addition, governments and corporate organizations of various countries currently focusing on blockchain applications also tend to use Ethereum technology-Brazil, Chile, Canada, Dubai and other countries have successively announced the use of Ethereum technology to improve their infrastructure; Microsoft, BP, CME More than 500 companies or institutions have joined the EEA (Enterprise Ethereum Alliance), hoping to benefit from the Ethereum ecosystem.

With the increase in development and participants, there are now nearly 17,000 Ethereum nodes running on six continents around the world, making it the most decentralized platform in the existing blockchain. With these auras, Ethereum occupies a dominant position in the platform-based public chain. However, as the number of Dapps and the number of active users continue to increase in the future, the current transaction processing speed of 30 TPS on the Ethereum network cannot bear the normal usage requirements. The rising handling fees due to transaction congestion at that time will also bring huge obstacles to the commercialization of applications.

Although expansion solutions such as sharding technology and Plasma projects are already on the way; once the expansion fails, even if the startup process is delayed for too long (in the past 12 months, the number of Ethereum Github code submissions was less than 1,000, and the activity ranking was only 76) , this public chain overlord may be caught up or even overtaken by latecomers; especially in 2018 when the competition of platform-based blockchain projects is becoming more and more fierce.

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1. Seniors who grew up under the halo of Ethereum

Among the public chain platforms that were launched before 2017 and have been launched on the main network, few public chain projects can compete with Ethereum. However, from the perspective of landing applications, there are still several projects that have divided part of the Ethereum market on the network access Dapp, namely NEO, QTUM, and Achain. The technical innovations of these projects have benchmarked the existence of Ethereum. However, some new problems were also generated when they were applied on the ground.

NEO: The ecological layout is gradually forming, and the issue of centralization is controversial

NEO is nicknamed "China's version of Ethereum" by members of the cryptocurrency community; it is the first open-source blockchain project in China. Judging from the current ecological and market value rankings that NEO has formed, it and Ethereum belong to the first echelon of platform-based public chains. As of now, there are more than 50 Dapp applications connected to the NEO network, and the underlying blockchain projects Ontology (ONT) and Elastos (ELA), which are compatible with it, have also received a lot of attention from the market since their launch.

Like Ethereum, NEO has its own general-purpose virtual machine NeoVM, which allows developers to use mainstream programming languages ​​such as C# and Java to create applications suitable for a specific scenario; while the low-coupling design of the underlying network goes a step further, Let NeoVM be ported to any blockchain or even non-blockchain systems. However, NEO is more down-to-earth than anonymous projects such as Ethereum. It uses a digital identity verification system based on the PKI X.509 standard, which makes it easier to obtain existing laws and government permission.

In addition, in order to improve the security and scalability of the blockchain network, NEO also proposed the anti-quantum cryptography mechanism NeoQS, the cross-chain interoperability protocol NeoX, and the distributed storage protocol NeoFS. From the surface data alone, the transaction processing speed of NEO is faster than that of Ethereum, with a throughput of 1,000 TPS. In theory, it can be increased to 10,000 TPS with appropriate optimization; but this is the result of sacrificing decentralization to a certain extent. .

The consensus mechanism (dBFT mechanism) adopted by NEO is similar to that of DPoS, which is to generate bookkeeping nodes through election and voting for collaborative bookkeeping. The difference is that there are two types of assets on the NEO blockchain, NEO and passively acquired GAS; users with a certain amount of GAS can nominate themselves to become Bookkeepers, and NEO holders vote to elect bookkeeping nodes. Although voting is carried out at any time, and the term of office of bookkeeping nodes is not fixed; but the problem of centralization still exists, especially in the initial development stage with only seven bookkeeping nodes at the beginning of this year. Two hour block.

QTUM: Compatible with BTC and ETH, is it innovative or old-fashioned?

Quantum chain is the world's first PoS blockchain compatible with the UTXO model. It was proposed in March last year, and the main network was launched in September of the same year. Last month, it also released a self-developed x86 virtual machine; so far, more than 20 Dapps have connected to it. There are more than a dozen ICO projects initiated based on QTUM.

In a sense, Quantum Chain is Ethereum that pays more attention to the security of user assets and the stability of the currency payment layer. It is fully compatible with EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) and supports all smart contracts on Ethereum; on this basis, a newly designed account abstraction layer is added to realize the integration of the stateless UTXO model. The use of this basic model can bring loose coupling and certain concurrency capabilities to the network, while inheriting the stability and security attributes of the Bitcoin network.

In terms of consensus protocol, Quantum Chain adopts a fine-tuned version of the PoS mechanism, that is, an incentive mechanism is added to the traditional PoS protocol, and higher interest is set for nodes that have been online for a long time, encouraging more nodes to participate in bookkeeping. According to the official website, the current QTUM network has more than 7,300 nodes scattered in more than 70 regions around the world, accounting for 75% of the number of Bitcoin network nodes. In order to create a decentralized network, Quantum Chain also proposed a Distributed Autonomous Protocol (DGP), which allows network nodes to adjust blockchain parameters at any time when they reach a certain threshold of consensus.

However, the expansion problem faced by Bitcoin and Ethereum also needs to be faced by Quantum Chain. Although the project founder believes that sacrificing the degree of network decentralization in pursuit of high TPS will make the blockchain lose its original meaning, the limitations brought by the transaction speed of less than 100 transactions per second are indeed very large. For this reason, Quantum Chain plans to adopt Lightning Network to improve network throughput. The virtual machine of Ethereum, the UTXO model of Bitcoin and the expansion plan, the integration of these technologies can indeed improve the security and decentralization of the network to some extent, but in essence, there is not much technological innovation. A breakthrough is less likely.

Achain: The smart contract sandbox also needs to implement multi-chain parallelism

One of the characteristics of the Achain project is the smart contract sandbox mechanism, which allows developers to conduct full-path automated testing in the sandbox before releasing the contract, thereby reducing trial and error costs and development cycles. Its mainnet launch time is similar to that of Quantum Chain, but the number of Dapps connected to the network is less than the latter, only a dozen or so.

According to the setting of the development roadmap, the focus of the first phase of Achain "Singularity" is to build a smart contract network. Trying to improve the transaction processing speed of the network, the Achain blockchain uses a weakly centralized consensus mechanism RDPoS similar to DPoS, and the transaction processing capacity can reach 1000 TPS in theory; while the adoption of Lua, a commonly used language in the field of game design, the construction of BaaS platform, The development of the modular virtual machine LVM and the event notification mechanism serve to lower the developer's threshold and improve the underlying performance.

In addition to building a smart contract ecosystem, Achain also helped other project teams release six separate blockchains, and plans to use VEP (Value Exchange Protocol) technology to realize chain-to-chain exchanges in the second and third stages of development. interaction. The establishment of a cross-chain gateway can form a multi-fork parallel ecological network with Achain as the main chain and interconnected through VEP; while improving network transaction throughput, it can also broaden the scope of application of Achain.

However, the more complex the smart contract logic is, the easier it is for security holes to appear. With the Achain codebase updated less than 1,000 times in the past 12 months, it remains to be seen whether such a complex setting can be realized or is safe.

Among the platform-type blockchains whose mainnet has been launched, apart from Ethereum, NEO, and Quantum Chain, which have developed their own virtual machines and are committed to building a smart contract ecosystem, there are other key blockchains. different featured items. For example, Bismuth, the first Python language platform, Ark, which aims to realize atomic swap, Asch based on side chain architecture, etc.; Lisk has the highest code submission frequency.

Lisk: A platform completely based on JavaScript, which makes people look forward to and worry

The core goal of the Lisk project is to create a complete Dapp plug-and-play system; it fully supports the mainstream programming language JavaScript and the Dapp application store developed on the blockchain, providing developers with a comprehensive platform from design, development to release and currency all steps of the process.

In terms of expansion, Lisk adopts the side chain framework to improve the scalability of the network. As shown in the figure above, the access sidechain is attached to the main blockchain, and each runs its own supported Dapp; only when cross-sidechain transactions are involved, it will pass through the main chain. In theory, this model can improve network anonymity, Fault tolerance and concurrency.

In the past 12 months, Lisk has been frequently updated in the Github code base, ranking fourth on the list (data source: Cryptomiso); during this period, a more friendly user interface and Lisk Core 1.0 test network were released. However, the development process of Lisk is still slow. Ashcoin, which is launched later than it and known as the "Chinese version of Lisk", has Dapp access. However, Lisk's official software development tools and programming interfaces have not yet been released. It is understood that BM, the founder of EOS, questioned Lisk earlier. It is undeniable that the establishment of a blockchain concept and smart contract platform based entirely on JavaScript is an innovative project, but it is very complicated to implement and requires a lot of time and cost.

Ardor: the top three Future Coin 2.0 in 2017

Data source: Coinmarketcap

Data source: Coinmarketcap

Ardor itself inherits all the current functions of Future Coin, such as proof of equity, PoS forging, decentralized voting, etc., and adds new technologies on this basis to build a scalable platform designed for the wide application of Dapp. In essence, the parent chain-child chain structure adopted by Ardor is similar to the expansion method of the Lisk side chain architecture, both of which are based on the concept of layered concurrency; the difference is that each node on the Ardor network can verify the child chain transactions, In terms of security, it is higher than Lisk where each side chain must have its own set of maintenance nodes.

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2. Familiar faces ready to launch on the mainnet

The public chain arena for incubating Dapps is like the field of computer or mobile operating systems, where the head effect is obvious, and the big brother Ethereum occupies an absolute share of the market. Of course, the variables in the early stage of the development of the field are difficult to predict. Whether the situation will be broken in the future depends on who can seize the opportunity in the commercial landing battle.

Among the underlying blockchain projects whose mainnet has only recently launched or is about to be launched, the first to attract attention among community members is EOS, the "currency celebrity" and Cardano built by the original Ethereum team.

EOS: a dominating project born with a golden spoon in its mouth

I don’t need to introduce more about hash bacteria. I believe you may have heard of EOS, which earned a lot of attention by relying on node elections in 2018. Before the EOS mainnet is launched, its Dapp ecosystem has already started to build. At present, more than 20 applications have been launched in the EOS ecosystem. According to the EOS index, there are also projects that are currently under development and public testing. Dozens.

In addition to the halo effect of BM, the reason that has attracted the attention of EOS is the parallel concept and the transaction fee-free mechanism of the project. Excluding the miner fees designed by other blockchain products to prevent DDOS attacks, EOS uses the graphene framework to speed up transaction processing; and promises to expand its TPS to the million level through parallel processing and other technical improvements.

Exempting transaction fees not only attracts users, but also reduces the burden on Dapp developers. Because when they write code, they don’t need to consider whether it will consume Gas value every time they write a paragraph like developing Ethereum applications. However, in the blockchain world, the three attributes of decentralization, security, and scalability cannot be combined. Under the pursuit of EOS's high TPS, the degree of decentralization is greatly reduced; for its DPoS consensus mechanism and community decentralization Questions about the democratic management methods are also growing. Regardless of the right or wrong of these disputes, the technological development process of EOS is indeed bumpy. Either the TPS effect of the test network is not as good as expected, or the network freezes after the mainnet goes online.

Cardano: a multi-layer architecture blockchain with an academic atmosphere

Also grasping the fact that Ethereum and other blockchain projects use the Gas transaction fee mechanism to consume too much cost and resources, Cardano proposes a layered blockchain architecture, which divides the network into a settlement layer similar to digital currency transactions such as Bitcoin ( CSL) and a computing layer (CCL) that can run smart contracts. The two relatively independent network layers can theoretically be upgraded and maintained according to their respective functions.

It seems that influenced by the company behind it, IOHK (an engineering company that develops blockchain solutions for academic institutions, enterprises and governments), the programming language Haskell used by Cardano has higher professional requirements; in addition, similar to Quantum Chain, Cardano also Advocates embracing regulation and introducing digital identity verification capabilities. Cardano's layered architecture design can maintain the anonymity of the network to a certain extent while introducing verification functions at the computing layer to meet regulatory requirements.

Judging from the maintenance status of the GitHub code base, the code submission frequency of the Cardano project is quite high and the update is stable. However, since its launch in 2017, the development progress of Cardano is still stuck in the settlement layer. Although the second phase of development, Shelley, started testing at the end of the month, and the development of the consensus protocol Ouroboros is nearing completion, the overall completion of the network is expected to be delayed until 2020; this development progress is a bit long in the face of increasingly fierce competition.

In any case, these projects that gain attention first always have advantages; on the basis of having a certain number of users, as long as there is a breakthrough in technology or the completion of the conceptual infrastructure, users are likely to increase rapidly in a short period of time.

In contrast, other projects that are about to or have recently launched on the main network have received far less attention than these star projects; but there are also many that have grown silently, such as Aeternity, which ranks relatively high in market value.

Aeternity: Another layered blockchain with a lot of team conflicts

Aeternity, known as the "European version of ETH", has a bumpy growth path. After several technical officers left, the team, led by the German computer scientist "Ethereum Godfather" Yanislav Malahov, completely rewrote the core using the erlang language. Code, and launched the platform mainnet this month.

In a sense, Aeternity is also a layered blockchain, but its layering method is more like "Ethereum blockchain + Thunderbolt Network 2.0". As one of Ethereum's expansion solutions, Thunderbolt Network and Lightning Network are only responsible for solving payment problems, mainly to improve the transaction throughput of the network; while the Turing-complete State Channel (State Channel) adopted by Aeternity also includes smart contracts, allowing All channels can operate independently and in parallel.

Combining these characteristics, the oracle machine system proposed by Aeternity will be able to conduct large-scale off-chain data collection, which is higher in capacity and processing speed than the oracle machine project in Ethereum and Quantum chain ecology. However, at this stage, the state channel can only deal with the problems of both parties, which has certain limitations; if you want to add a third person to the channel, you need to develop a multi-party state channel.

In addition to preparing for future large-scale concurrent activities, Aeternity chose Erlang, a programming language developed by Ericsson's CS-Lab. This language supports a large number of concurrent processes, and does not require the operating system to have a concurrency mechanism; however, it is relatively small and its users are mostly engineers, which may bring some inconvenience to the formation of the Aeternity smart contract ecosystem in the future.

Aion: It focuses on cross-chain communication and is committed to becoming the Internet in the blockchain industry

Projects such as Polkadot launched by Gavin Wood, the co-founder of Ethereum, and Cosmos released by the Tendermint team focus on cross-chain transaction technology research, which is conducive to the construction of a decentralized trading platform. The cross-chain communication that Aion needs to do is not only to connect Tokens together, but also to use its Aion-1 protocol and Aion virtual machine to connect blockchain information to form a huge decentralized blockchain Internet.

It is reported that at the end of last year, Aion also established a "cross-chain alliance" with similar projects in the field - ICON, which is known as the "Korean version of ETH", and Wanchain, which launched its main network at the beginning of this year, and plans to jointly create Alibaba in the blockchain industry. Unlike the two partners, Aion has also added a cross-chain information interaction function, allowing Dapps in its ecosystem to be linked, that is, to change the current state according to changes in information on other blockchains.

Powerful projects require technical support, but the Aion project has little description of its cross-chain technology's ability to withstand pressure. After the project went live on the mainnet in April this year, the code update speed on GitHub also declined.

Nebulas: Incentive agreement launched to attract developers to settle in

Nebulas (Nebulas) is also a fast-growing Dapp ecosystem project in this echelon. Driven by its developer incentive mechanism, many developers have entered the Nebulas ecosystem shortly after the mainnet went live and developed their own Dapps.

Complementing the above incentive agreement is that Nebulas will transition from DPoS to PoD (Proof of Contribution) consensus mechanism in the future; through the integration of PoS and PoI mechanisms, coupled with the Nebulas Index (NR ), in the future Nebulas will be able to distribute bookkeeping rewards based on the contribution of each node to the project. Based on the value scale defined by Nebulas, Nebulas is also trying to build a search engine for decentralized applications, becoming Google on the blockchain, and at the same time broaden its Dapp ecological network in this way.

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3. A rookie who is motivated and submits code frequently

Technological innovation is the attempt of these latecomers to seek breakthroughs, and it is also the key to breaking the barriers of the head effect in the field. The most indispensable thing in the currency circle is the concept of innovation. In just half a year in 2018, more than 200 new projects appeared (data source: Coinmarketcap).

It is difficult to judge who is good and who is bad among the dazzling new stars. Moreover, the industry is still in the early stage of development. Whether these innovative technologies are superfluous or a breakthrough in development has yet to be tested by the market. Of course, it depends on whether the project can actually realize the functions it describes. From the current statistics on the CryptoMiso website, RChin, Nuls and other blockchain projects that focus on a certain technology are more enthusiastic about development, and the code update speed is also very fast. quick.

New Consensus Mechanism

Nuls：Based on the modular design of services and events, and the multi-chain parallelism based on cross-chain consensus, the technical characteristics of the Nuls system are actually the integration of the Ardor parent-child chain structure and cross-chain consensus mechanism; enabling the system to support POW, DPOS, POS, PBFT and other consensus mechanisms, while its main chain adopts the PoC (credit consensus) mechanism proposed by the team innovation by default.

Under this mechanism, the system will evaluate the nodes similar to Sesame Credit. Only when the credit score meets the hard indicators set by the network, the nodes can participate in the blockchain consensus, and then take turns to generate blocks according to the network order. During the operation, the system will also monitor the nodes in real time. Once there is a disconnection, crash or malicious attack, it will give a yellow card warning and a red card exit prompt accordingly. However, according to another participation standard, the holder needs to hold at least 20,000 NULS and obtain more than 200,000 but less than 500,000 NULS entrusted to the node in order to become a valid node, participate in the consensus and obtain rewards. In essence, the settings and functions of effective nodes are no different from those of PoS mining pools, except that the NULS network has set entry thresholds and restrictions for these "mining pools".

PoA：In the past 12 months, the code of PoA, known as the supplementary project for the failure of Ethereum expansion, has been updated quickly. At the same time, it released its cross-chain bridge POA Bridge concurrent POA 20 tokens, enabling users to send POA tokens between the POA network and the Ethereum network. currency.

However, judging from the description on the official website, PoA exists more in the form of Ethereum sidechains; and according to the white paper - fully compatible with Ethereum, fully supporting Parity client, etc. - it can be seen that PoA can be said to be It is a replica of Ethereum, but it replaces the original PoW consensus mechanism with a PoA (Proof of Authority) mechanism. The verification speed of this committee election mechanism is very fast, which can improve the transaction processing speed of the network to a certain extent; but its degree of centralization is relatively high, and it is more suitable for use in private chains, and it can operate as usual without a distributed trust system.

Fragmentation technology

The concept of sharding technology originated from traditional databases. As the name implies, the data in the block is divided into many different "fragments" and stored on each node. This decentralized parallel system can reduce the data storage capacity of each node while maintaining the integrity and stability of the main chain, so as to achieve the expansion effect. People including Vitalik and Loi Luu from the National University of Singapore believe that sharding technology is a longer-term and theoretically feasible expansion solution.

At present, the sharding technology of Ethereum is still under development, and the Zilliqa project, which was just launched in March this year, has launched a test network with sharding technology, and it has also been upgraded in the middle of this month. According to its internal members, in the recent internal stress test, Zilliqa achieved a performance of 2000 transactions per second with 3600 nodes and 6 shards, which is close to 25% of the processing speed of Visa. Contrary to other blockchain platforms, the Zilliqa network transaction processing capacity increases with the increase of nodes; therefore, the increase of network participants in the future will not make the blockchain more congested, but can achieve parallelism Effect of processing speed increase.

Tracing back to the source, Zilliqa team members Prateek Saxena and Loi Luu, teachers and students of the National University of Singapore, are the proposers of sharding technology, which is why Zilliqa is called the "King of Sharding". However, Zilliqa's method of processing sharding according to address and data processing, and storage without sharding has brought certain limitations to its improvement of data access and future support for smart contracts. Rchain, which also focuses on sharding technology and has a faster code update speed, plans to use data sharding and business-oriented registration mechanisms to solve these problems; however, this project, which was launched earlier than Zilliqa, has not yet released a test network.

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4. Is decentralized parallelism the ultimate solution to the blockchain "trilemma"?

In fact, the current controversy about the underlying blockchain projects in the field boils down to the game between decentralization and scalability, complete function optimization and network security. Whether it is Ethereum, the most decentralized public chain hegemony, EOS, the currency circle celebrity known as the million-level TPS, or NEO, which has a higher degree of virtual machine scalability; all sacrifice to achieve the goal to a certain extent. Without one or two of the "three elements", at least from the perspective of these platform-based blockchain projects that have been launched, there is still a long way to go for the development of the public chain.

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