Under the aura of a large company and the blessing of the blockchain, NetEase's first blockchain product "Netease Odaily" was launched in less than two months and had millions of daily users.
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Netease Odaily real-time data, as of November 7, 2018, the cumulative data volume exceeds 200 million
Insufficient performance is a major challenge for the blockchain. How does Netease Odaily deal with this problem?
The industry actually knows very little about the underlying technology behind blockchain applications. Recently, Odaily exclusively learned that NetEase Odaily's bottom layer is developed based on the domestic open source alliance chain project FISCO BCOS. FISCO BCOS (hereinafter referred to as BCOS) is developed by the open source working group of the Financial Blockchain Cooperation Alliance (referred to as the Golden Chain Alliance). The Open Source Working Group of the Golden Chain Alliance is composed of nine member institutions including WeBank, Shenzhen Securities Express, and Tencent.
Odaily interviewed Fan Ruibin, the leader of the Open Source Working Group of the Golden Chain Alliance and the person in charge of the blockchain of WeBank, to understand the origin, technical structure and development ideas of the project.
Open source projects are different from commercial cooperation. After the project is open source, everyone can get it for free. The BCOS team also discovered by accident that Netease Odaily is their user.
"At the beginning of this year, we discovered that NetEase Odaily students joined the BCOS community and were very active in discussing the technology of this project." Fan Ruibin told Odaily, "Further, we confirmed this matter with them."
FISCO BCOS was open-sourced in December last year. Its new features and modules have been verified to be stable and meet the needs of the universal industry after a period of time.
"Although it is an underlying platform for the financial field, it is not only available to financial companies." According to the statistics of the open source working group, the current cases of using BCOS as the underlying platform include the "arbitration chain" of the Guangzhou Arbitration Commission and the copyright deposit of Annie shares. The securities platform, the interbank reconciliation platform of WeBank, and the supply chain financial platform of Sifang Jingchuang have more than hundreds of cases, covering finance, justice, copyright, property management and other fields.
Why Open Source: How Blockchain Works Best
“At first, they ignored, then they laughed at us, then they feared.”
This sentence at the Red Hat (Red Hat) conference, an open source solution provider, describes the growth of open source software in foreign countries. It talks about the change of Microsoft's attitude towards "open source", first turning a blind eye, then ridiculing, and then fearing. This "fear" eventually led to Microsoft's eventual acquisition of Github, and IBM's acquisition of Red Hat.
The open source mode of operation has developed into a force to compete with commercial operation in foreign countries, and they have become two complementary ways of software development and maintenance. International Internet companies also maintain many open source projects in order to attract developers, but similar cases are rare in China.
There are many large domestic companies deploying blockchain, but few are open source. Why do open source working groups choose to participate deeply in open source projects?
Fan Ruibin believes that the choice of open source is determined by the technical characteristics of the blockchain. The applicable scenario of the blockchain itself is multi-party participation. It is a trust machine, and open source is the most suitable mode of operation. "We hope to unite many partners to build an ecosystem based on open source projects."
Open, transparent and auditable code is the foundation of trust and reliability. Open source means that users in the community can use it for free more easily. At the same time, the low cost of trial and error attracts more non-giant SMEs and individuals to use it.
Users in the community cannot actually be called customers. Among them are B-end institutional users with extremely diverse needs, as well as C-end individual users. Fan Ruibin said that some B-side users want to use the underlying platform for development. They have found a blockchain application scenario and have a good R&D team, but they often lack a good underlying platform. FISCO BCOS can provide technical exchanges and pull up Some training institutions operate in a community manner.
Why choose the alliance chain: the public chain does not serve the public, but the alliance chain can
Fan Ruibin said that when the team first entered the blockchain field, they first faced the choice of alliance chain or public chain. “At that time, we completely chose the route of the alliance chain, and determined that only the alliance chain can take into account the route of financial stability and innovation.”
The public chain emphasizes the concept of fairness and decentralization, but in actual operation, it is becoming more and more centralized and monopolized. "Public blockchains are no longer owned by the public. This is a big problem."
At the same time, he does not think that the beneficiaries of the alliance chain are only the B side. The B-side reduces transaction costs through the blockchain, and the benefits should be shared by the public. "We believe that the distributed business model is the future. All parties involved are equal, and all parties cooperate on an equal footing to share value, which can avoid the problem of being too big to fail in business. To realize this shared and transparent model, you need a block If there is no chain, it needs to be open source. The public alliance chain will be the key to open this door."
Algorithms are indeed one of the sources of trust. But the long-term trust mechanism of human society is also very valuable, such as judicial mechanism and supervision system. "I think the algorithm combined with the original mechanism is the future."
A Chinese version of Hyperledger Fabric?
Although it is not as blooming as the public chain, open source alliance chain projects are not rare, and are often led by large international companies. For example, IBM's open source Hyperledger Fabric, JPMorgan Chase's Quorum, R3's Corda, and Microsoft's Coco. Among them, the Hyperledger community is the most mature, and has also held many promotional activities offline, coupled with the strong promotion of IBM, its awareness should be the highest among the international alliance chain projects.
Compared with foreign alliance chains, the characteristics of the underlying architecture and design concept of FISCO BCOS are mainly reflected in the following aspects:
1. Security: According to the characteristics of the alliance chain, functions such as institutional access, CA certification, and key management are added, which is equivalent to a comprehensive system management.
2. Privacy protection: support rights management and physical isolation, which are the most basic. He also specifically introduced two points: BCOS supports national secrets (the standard algorithm certified by the State Cryptography Administration); at the same time, it is also open source, including homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proof, group signature, ring signature and other privacy protection capabilities.
3. Performance: "This is something that many people pay more attention to. For example, the case of NetEase Odaily has high requirements for technology. This is precisely an important feature of BCOS. Because we supported it when we open sourced it last year. It is very important. One of the capabilities—the ability to do parallel computing.”
The parallel computing multi-chain design adopted by BCOS requires developers to maintain the isomorphic characteristics of multiple chains as much as possible to reduce conflicts. "We have a clear technical point of view, that is, no matter how long the performance of a single chain can be, it will always be limited. It is limited by its hardware environment and hardware equipment. Therefore, on the basis of a single chain, can The underlying platform architecture supports flexible, efficient, reliable, and secure parallel computing expansion capabilities. This is very important, so that users can flexibly and conveniently choose appropriate resources according to the actual needs of business products to meet their needs performance."
The test data shows that the single-chain TPS of BCOS can reach thousands of levels in an environment of four nodes on an ordinary X86 PC server.
After multi-chain, it is necessary to solve the problem of cross-chain and hotspot accounts. "The main idea of cross-chain is to ensure that the data between different single chains can be verified, cannot be tampered with and cannot be repudiated." BCOS mainly uses Merkle tree and consensus signature technology to achieve cross-chain existence, tamper-proof and Proof of non-repudiation; hotspot accounts are changed from synchronous to asynchronous, similar to the way of the Internet.
4. Ease of use: "This point is easily overlooked, but I think the important difference between whether it is a toy for individual developers or an enterprise-level platform is ease of use.
5. Reliability, how to prove the reliability of the platform? First, through open source, everyone can judge and evaluate; second, true knowledge comes from practice. This underlying platform has been tested by many external organizations and applications, and has been running in a production environment for a long time.
Reference article:
I am Lu Xiaoming, editor of Odaily. I am exploring the real blockchain. Please add lohiuming for breaking news and communication. Please note your name, unit, position and reason.
Reference article:
Odaily blockchain (Netease Odaily official browser)
Golden Chain Alliance launched a financial upgrade version - FISCO BCOS
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