Last week I wrote a post about Seele, a fourth-generation blockchain network trying to address the key issues of scalability, security etc. In this post, I would like to focus more on the technologies that differentiate Seele from its competitors - some of the novice stuff they are developing and the rationale behind them. Amongst the several innovative things that Seele brings to the table, their novel consensus algorithm, the heterogeneous forest network-based architecture and the optimized communication protocols in the transport and the internet layers (VTP and QVIC), stand out from the rest. Therefore, I thought I would shed more light on each of these inventive technologies to understand Seele's overall architecture.
With a view to improving Scalability, Security, and Efficiency in the network, Seele introduces a novel consensus algorithm known as "Neural Consensus" that is inspired from the biological neural networks. What this means is that, instead of involving all the participants within the network for producing the blocks, the consensus algorithm will randomly select a few block producers who will, in turn, employ the practical BFT algorithm to select the final block producer for validation in an asynchronous environment. The nodes will also use continuous voting instead of discrete voting and all the nodes participate concurrently. The greatest advantage of this set up is that it allows the network to scale linearly, proportional to the node size. To put things into perspective, the Seele test network reached a transaction speed (in TPS) of 100K, while significantly reducing the transaction confirmation delay. Further, a direct consequence of this design is the low transmission overhead as fewer nodes participate in the consensus at a given time, unlike what you witness in other blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum. The algorithm also makes the network immune to Sybil attacks as it ranks the nodes based on the balance in their account, thereby making it extremely expensive to cheat or game the system.
" One of the most important features of the consensus algorithm is the linear scalability, that is, the performance increases linearly with the node size. "
An architecture inspired from the traditional DNS (Domain Name System) framework, the Heterogeneous Forest Network addresses the major issue of having to accommodate a wide variety of businesses that require different services. The architecture features a global service chain, known as the Meta chain that caters to a large number of subnets which may serve one or more businesses. The architecture facilitates performance optimization by clubbing chains that require identical handling. Further, it also provides the necessary isolation between chains that are non-identical by nature. For example, some business use cases may require compute-intensive chain design while some others may require I/O intensive design, while there may also be cases that demand a mixture of the two. In summary, the Heterogenous forest network design makes Seele a flexible and versatile blockchain network, allowing to fit in a variety of complex business use cases.
"Heterogeneous forest network structure can meet different types of complex business needs in the real world."
In a heterogeneous architecture with diverse assets and chains, it's crucial to design a protocol that facilitates the systematic naming, discovery and addressing of the underlying assets and the chains, therefore, paving the way for an efficient value transmission between these. For this, Seele introduces the Value Transport Protocol (VTP) that complements its Heterogeneous Forest Network architecture well. The application layer protocol, in this regards, that is modeled on the traditional HTTP is called VHTTP and is used by Seele for the Value Internet, and facilitates asset registration, discovery etc. The Uniform Asset Identifier (UAI), a primary derivative of the VTP will name assets in the network in a hierarchical fashion, allowing for their discovery and addressing. Seele also incorporates a Route Cache mechanism that allows for the efficient utilization of the network while also improving data availability.
Seele has identified that the traditional TCP/UDP protocol that power the existing networks need tweaking due to the design requirements of transport and application layers in a blockchain. For this Seele introduces a Quick Value Internet Connection(QVIC) protocol that has a low latency and high tolerance for packet losses to acclimatize better in a decentralized environment. It excels the TCP/UDP in several situations, especially during the transmission of packets of a specific block size (1M, 2M). Based on the in-house tests conducted by the Seele team, QVIC protocol seems to have proved its worth as it significantly increased the transmission rate as well as the stability and efficiency of the network.
"QVIC protocol that can better adapt to and meet the requirements of blockchain network than traditional Internet TCP and UDP protocols used in current blockchain networks."
This article is an attempt to highlight some of the unique frameworks of the ambitious Seele project that regards itself as Blockchain 4.0. It's beyond anyone's doubt that blockchains and distributed systems will eventually cater to the business and enterprise use cases, however, currently, the primary deterrents for this are Scalability, Security etc. If Seele manages to solve these issues and pave the way for the widespread adoption of blockchains, there is no doubt that its technology stack consisting of the key differentiators explained above, would have played a major role.
