Today we’re announcing 0chain, a 0-cost superfast, decentralized cloud for your off-chain {smart contract, data} for IoT, Web, and Enterprise apps .
As Vitalik stated at DevCon Nov ’17, the number one problem is scalability. Today majority of DApps are on Ethereum because it has become a golden vehicle for ICOs and tokenized apps. However, most DApps have almost all their smart contract execution and data storage on a centralized cloud such as AWS.
0chain aims to fill this void and provide a free scalable cloud for DApps to become completely decentralized. DApps can move their off-chain smart contract and data on to our platform, and provide their customers with assured decentralized service, but conserve capital and focus their spend on developing their business.
The Technology
Our blockchain is designed to execute a smart contract in sub-second, so that one piece of smart contract does not have to wait minutes or an hour for the result of the next one. Our speed is the result of an efficient consensus set made up of 3 primary miners, 6 secondary miners, and 6 bench miners to make sure we have an honest consensus that needs at least 5/9 honest miners, and allow for network disruption, malicious attacks, data withholding, and data manipulation.
And because we have parallel chains, concurrent threads, and an efficient consensus, we can theoretically have infinite transactions. We also have a notion of self-forking for an evolution toward chains tweaked for specific verticals and applications, because we understand that the parameters of one chain cannot satisfy every vertical or application.
In fact, one parameter that is bound to change is the block time, which stipulates finality in a sub-second or minutes depending on the application. Buying coffee, receiving a token for a post, and other micro-payments can be transacted on a sub-second chain, while analytics, image processing for IoT, AI apps may need to be on a separate 2-minute chain. The self-forking aspect allows for new chains to evolve decoupled from the network token value.
Token Economy
To provide a free scalable cloud, we need to control the inflation rate of tokens to the miners. To achieve this we have a cost-efficient consensus, computing, and storage schemes. We divide the infrastructure scheme up into CPU, RAM, and SSD component needs and designate different duties to miners, sharders, and blobbers. Miners generate and validate blocks. Sharders store blocks. Blobbers store data.
Additionally, we will split our genesis chain into smart contract and data chains at the onset. This will allow Miners and Sharders to use different equipment for a data chain and smart contract chain, and charge different prices to the network. The smart contract chain is stateful and so will need higher RAM servers. The miners, sharders, blobbers will need to offer pricing comparable to a traditional cloud at their own fiat currency, and 0chain will adjust token payout based on a daily exchange rate.
Apart from having a fair miner price, we also need the DApps to hold tokens based on an expected computational and storage need that they would pay a traditional cloud annually, except that they just need to hold it like a bank. There are no fees. And if the DApp happens to hold enough tokens initially, and the token value increases, then they have a free scalable cloud for years to come without buying any additional tokens. This holding rate is adjusted on a regular basis to control the inflation rate, and these adjustments are done such that the reward pool lasts at least 100 years.
