By Derek Yoo

Decentralization is the core principle of Web3, but in the face of rapidly occupying the market or achieving higher transaction throughput requirements, decentralization is often "the last principle". Polkadot has brought the principle of decentralization back to a high position. When developing parachains, we must adhere to the standard of decentralization, which is an important part of Polkadot's ecosystem.

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Decentralized technology can create a better world

History tells us that when there is enough power, it means that the power will be at risk of being abused. Stories of centralization that cover the sky with one hand are often staged in the world in ancient and modern times. The network-centric interaction model has changed the original global communication model dominated by physical movement. If power is allowed to expand indiscriminately, centralization will bring unavoidable risks.

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Decentralization is where Polkadot shines

The decentralized nature of Polkadot and Kusama relay chain is the main consideration of Moonbeam when choosing to build the network. Both Polkadot and Kusama relay chains are highly decentralized systems, and all parachains must meet the standards of decentralization they set.

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Design trade-offs in favor of decentralization

Currently, many experiments are attempted in the underlying blockchain infrastructure, with projects exploring different design trade-offs within varying degrees of decentralization.

Recently, a strategy has become popular in the market: set up a small number of validators or key nodes, and invest a lot of infrastructure behind the scenes, and increase the overall transaction volume by sacrificing decentralization. The effect of this is indeed remarkable. The entire system can run quickly on a centralized infrastructure such as AWS, and it is much easier to build a centralized infrastructure (my first half of my career experience has confirmed it). Moreover, you can greatly reduce complexity and time-to-market by centralizing established elements.

This approach is very attractive, but it is very difficult to upgrade the project in the direction of decentralization in the future. Decentralization needs to be designed into the system from the beginning.

When designing Moonbeam and Moonriver, some examples of decentralization that we liked include:

• Deployed first on Kusama and Polkadot, and continues to grow in a decentralized manner across these networks.

• Released as a parachain rather than an independent chain. This helps us directly launch the decentralized security services provided by the relay chain. Moonriver can have 900 validators confirming blocks for Moonriver within a few weeks of going live.

• A full on-chain governance process has been adopted from the beginning to handle changes to the protocol layer, including upgrades.

• Implementing a custom parachain staking module enables an open and decentralized set of collators to produce blocks on the network, rather than relying on a small set of authorized collators to produce blocks.

• A large number of stakeholders participate and become the initial Token holders of the network.

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The Practical Significance of Decentralization

While there are many philosophical reasons for preferring decentralized systems over centralized ones, there are also practical reasons to consider.

While there are many philosophical reasons for leaning toward decentralized systems, there are also practical factors to consider.

I recently heard the argument that "users don't care about decentralization". This may be true for some users in the current environment. For these users, decentralization is often seen as something you should theoretically need, and networks and protocols that are relatively less decentralized seem to work well, and in some cases, perform better.

In my opinion, those features of centralization that are accepted or adopted today will be the weaknesses of tomorrow and where the network can (and most likely will) be threatened and attacked. This includes components of the centralized protocol infrastructure, such as reliance on a small number of node operators. But this potential risk also extends to supporting infrastructure, such as centralized RPC terminal service providers, and may even spread all the way to wallet providers at the edge of the network.

As the usage, value, and importance of Web3 platforms and applications increase dramatically, today's authoritarians will be increasingly threatened and likely to take increasingly coercive measures to shut down or block these platforms development of.

In this case, the anti-censorship capability of the Web3 platform is particularly important. Only those platforms that are truly decentralized can adequately defend against these threats. I think that in the near future, some platforms that have weakened decentralization may face a harsher living environment.

Building with Substrate provides a good decentralized foundation for Moonbeam and Moonriver.Recently launched Substrate Connectfirst level title

Moonbeam's role in the Web3 story

Moonbeam and Moonriver are infrastructure platforms for developers. These two platforms provide an open and permissionless infrastructure for developers of Web3-based applications to communicate their ideas and solve problems in a different way by using Web3 technologies.

While these platforms provide the infrastructure, it is all the developers who are creating new protocols and deploying them on Moonbeam and Moonriver that are really driving Web3 and more new users to Web3. Moonbeam ownsandandGrants Acceleration Program, which can facilitate teams to build decentralized applications. The goal of the founding team is to support developers as best they can.

If you are interested in Moonbeam, and even want to develop and deploy Web3 applications, please visitMoonbeam DatabaseAbout MoonbeamMoonbeam Discord。

About Moonbeam

Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on the Polkadot network that facilitates the development of natively interoperable applications. Through its Ethereum compatibility, developers are able to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and Dapp front-ends on Moonbeam with minimal code adjustments. As a parachain on the Polkadot network, Moonbeam will also benefit from the shared security of the Polkadot relay chain and connectivity to other Polkadot-related chains. Moonbeam is developed by the PureStake team and is currently in the pre-launch stage. The mainnet is scheduled to go live in the fourth quarter of 2021.

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Moonriver is Moonbeam's peer network designed to provide a permanent testing environment for incentivized experiments. The code of the newly launched project will be deployed to Moonriver first, and undergo a series of tests and experimental verifications in its real economic environment. After the verification is completed and passed the test, the project code can be officially deployed to Moonbeam on Polkadot.

Moonriver is Moonbeam's peer network designed to provide a permanent testing environment for incentivized experiments. The code of the newly launched project will be deployed to Moonriver first, and undergo a series of tests and experimental verifications in its real economic environment. After the verification is completed and passed the test, the project code can be officially deployed to Moonbeam on Polkadot.

For more information, please visit:https://moonbeam.network/networks/moonriver/