At 8:00 p.m. on August 5th, Math Wallet held the 9th Math Show. We were honored to invite Erik Trautman, CEO of the NEAR Foundation, and Bi Tongtong, co-founder and editor-in-chief of PANews, to take everyone in-depth to reveal the secrets of "NEAR". Will it be the next dark horse? , the following is a wonderful writing of the night. (Note: This is the Chinese translation version)
Erik Trautman：
Bi Tongtong:
Bi Tongtong:
Presumably everyone is more concerned about the recent development of NEAR and wants to know more about when the mainnet will be launched, and what new plans there will be in the future, then we will invite Erik to share with us.
Erik Trautman：
Let me briefly introduce NEAR first. NEAR is a decentralized application platform built on the NEAR protocol, and it is also a public chain that adopts PoS consensus. NEAR adopts sharding expansion technology, and also has an innovative account model, so that apps developed based on NEAR can obtain availability similar to current Internet applications.
Personally, I am very optimistic about the NEAR project because we have the best team in the world developing this technology, and we are doing things that no one else has done. Many teams have tried to develop the "most scalable" blockchain system, but the NEAR team realized early on that scaling is meaningless if no one can develop or use the applications supported by the platform. In other words, the blockchain needs to be both scalable and usable.
The scaling technology adopted by NEAR is the same as the sharding technology being developed by the Ethereum 2.0 design team, but NEAR provides applications with higher performance. Innovation at the account level means that NEAR incorporates some "killer features" that other blockchain platforms do not have, resulting in better usability for developers, users, and validators. If you are interested, I am happy to provide you with more information on NEAR's scaling technology.
The mainnet launch has gone through three stages. The first stage started on April 22, also known as the POA stage. In the POA phase, the nodes are operated by the NEAR Foundation. The upcoming second phase is called "Mainnet Restricted Phase", when the operation of nodes will be handed over to third-party validators. The last stage is called the "open mainnet stage", and the specific opening time will be decided by validator voting, similar to Cosmos.
In the first two stages, transfers between accounts are restricted, but developers can still deploy their own apps on the main network, and the status of transactions will be preserved. Regular users can use these apps, but may experience some inconvenience due to transfer restrictions. After entering the final stage, there are no restrictions on creating accounts and transferring funds between accounts, and it will be more convenient for users to use the app.
Bi Tongtong:
Bi Tongtong:
What are the similarities and differences between NEAR and Ethereum 2.0? V God is also optimistic about NEAR's sharding technology. What are the advantages?
Erik Trautman：
Both NEAR and ETH 2.0 believe that sharding is the ultimate solution for blockchain expansion, and the technical architecture of both parties focuses on the expansion of decentralized applications (DApps), rather than the application chain architecture (Cosmos & Polkadot).
The main difference between the two is that NEAR uses a complete main chain to shard each block instead of an independent beacon chain. Each produced block contains "segments" that are processed by a different subset of nodes. Such a design can guarantee the data availability of transactions in each shard from the consensus layer, and at the same time easily reduce the risk of any attack from the shard layer. At the same time, the design also provides the function of cross-shard communication, which only needs one block to complete cross-shard communication, saving developers the trouble of understanding shards.
Because of this, we don't have a fixed number of shards set - the number of shards will adjust as demand changes (i.e. dynamically reshard). Such a design allows the network to maintain low transaction fees. Interestingly, taking this approach allows everyone in the network to trace a chain and verify its accuracy according to their desired level of security, so it is easier to implement than maintaining multiple chains in parallel. We strive to provide simple solutions to complex problems, because simplicity and ease of use empower more people to interact with software.
For more information on this issue, you can check out the two blogs written by D1 and Blue Fox Notes, which contain a high-level analysis of this issue:
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/xX70WwGGjPb-TJo9lkkUlA
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/cILVMWG8XyfhwqQeSuC3mA
Bi Tongtong:
https://near.org/papers/nightshade/
Bi Tongtong:
The next question is what everyone is concerned about recently. What do you think of the high mining fees on the ETH network? How does NEAR solve this problem?
Erik Trautman：
Bi Tongtong:
Bi Tongtong:
Erik mentioned earlier that NEAR adopts a sharding design, which does not require each node to store all the data. If some nodes lose data in the middle, will it affect the whole?
Erik Trautman：
The data of each shard is stored in the current verification node, the next batch of verification nodes, tracking & application nodes, and archive nodes. Current validators are responsible for collecting transactions for a particular shard and producing shards. They have current data, provide fast state transitions, and calculate the next state hash. The next batch of validators are downloading or have already downloaded data at this time, because when the epoch changes, they need to start producing shards.
Tracking or application nodes are responsible for tracking shards as they need to apply data. For example, RPC nodes, similar to Infura, are what we call tracking nodes, and their goal is to ensure that they can respond to any data query request. Applications or wallets also run such nodes in order to present verified data to users.
NEAR's archive nodes are very similar to those of other blockchains, and can track any or all shards and provide data to nodes and users. For example, our browser (https://explorer.near.org) runs the file node, which can track all data.
In addition, within the consensus, there is data availability for blocks, for which the protocol is responsible for guaranteeing at least 3 epochs. That is to say, if the current verification node and the next batch of verification nodes lose data, they can collect data from other verification nodes and restore the lost data from other verification nodes (if there are no other nodes in the network) within 1.5 days .
Bi Tongtong:
Bi Tongtong:
The fourth question is still about technology. How does NEAR technology achieve interoperability with the ETH network? How to ensure asset security?
Erik Trautman：
Interoperability between NEAR and Ethereum is achieved through a trustless bridge technology (hereinafter referred to as "Rainbow Bridge"). The so-called trustless bridge means that there is no third party, additional economic system or other mechanisms other than the consensus of the relevant chain.
Theoretically, the technology is very similar to the design of IBC, but the existing IBC only describes the principle of how to connect with the blockchain based on Tendermint technology.
NEAR's Rainbow Bridge can verify the proof-of-work that Ethereum miners have completed, ensuring that valid blocks are provided to the network. Based on this information, the NEAR Chain can establish a trusted source of truth in a manner similar to any other node of the network.
For example, this method can be used to transfer ERC-20 tokens: when an ERC-20 token is sent to a contract in Ethereum, a mirror smart contract of NEAR can Fang's light client verifies the activity. This method can mint corresponding tokens, which can be used by users to pay for the usage fees of various applications of NEAR in the future.
Let’s review the token destruction mechanism again. The act of destroying the tokens on the NEAR platform is used as evidence in the Ethereum smart contract, the purpose of which is to release the corresponding ERC-20 tokens. In this way, a token on a chain can correspond to a unique owner at a time.
Bi Tongtong:
Bi Tongtong:
DeFi is booming recently, will NEAR make strategic adjustments in DeFi-related aspects, and is there any relevant deployment and plan?
Erik Trautman：
Open finance has always been one of our visions. According to our vision, the blockchain world will evolve in the order of open currency, open finance, and open network. For details, you can refer to this blog post I published earlier:
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/4c6BB9mJvn92ek1TBXrmYA
In short, using our rainbow bridge technology, anyone (user, app developer, any entity) can transfer assets between Ethereum and NEAR without permission. For example, stablecoins such as USDT or DAI will become the cornerstone of more open finance and open network use cases.
In fact, many senior ETH developers will transfer some assets (such as MakerDAO) or develop new apps and protocols (Balancer, AAVE, 1inch). The development of these protocols is limited due to the high gas fee of Ethereum.
Bi Tongtong:
Bi Tongtong:
Thank you very much to the "show" friends who participated in the Math Show #009 event tonight, and thank guest Erik for sharing.
In addition, you can also participate in the "the one you want to meet" activity initiated by Math Show, recommend and help the guests you want to meet on "Math Show", and have the opportunity to become a surprise MC and the guests you want to meet Talk face to face,
Link: http://mathshow.mikecrm.com/2QEz163
So far, this Math Show #009 "show" friend meeting is over, thank you again for your time and listening, we will see you in the next issue, good night everyone~
