Lend and Borrow Cryptocurrency
Bloqboard Co-founded by Alex Bazhanau and Bahachuk, allows users to share their cryptos. The firm is offering a lending platform enabling peer-to-peer cryptocurrency lending via smart contracts. The firm lets you share your ERC20 tokens with your buddies, and, in theory, they have to pay you back. The firm recently raised $1.2 million from POlychain Capital to launch a lending system powered by decentralized lending protocols.
Read more at techcrunch
Bitcoin, Litecoin, Zcash, Cardano, Ether, Dogecoin, Tether, Titcoin, Potcoin, Auroracoin, Primecoin, Swiftcoin just to name a few of exploding cryptocurrency market. As per investing currency list, there are 2260 cryptocurrencies listed on the market as of 14-Sept. As of 15, March 2018 there were 1658 cryptocurrencies, a whooping upward growth. While launching a crypto may not be much of significance, but getting a position in the market is indeed a tough job.
As of March, the cryptocurrency market capitalization was under $369 billion, that indicates that each of the cryptocurrency in March was worth of ~$222 million. However, that’s not the fact – the top 20 leading cryptos account for 89% of the total market — the other 1,638 cryptocurrencies are worth a combined $39.6 billion.
In fact, if you try listing cryptos with the largest market capitalization, here are the top five cryptos as of writing this article –
As experts recommend while placing your bet choose the one with the market capitilization[total coins that will ever be produced times current value], the coins potential to survive in the market and the ease with which a coin can be traded for fiat currency like the US dollars.
While market cap, its potential to survive and ease to convert are some of the best bets, Traders owning cryptos other than Litecoin, Bitcoin, Ethereum; Bitcoin Cash also find it hard to trade them for actual fiat. Most of the coins could be traded at online cryptocurrency exchange, and individuals could also buy stuff online, but converting it into a fiat means –
So even though a USD value is listed against each of the cryptocurrency, that does not signify you can liquidate it as per your wish.
Our current post is part 3 of our Ethereum series, in case you have missed our earlier post, please go through Ethereum Roadmap Explained and How Could Plasma Help Ethereum Scale Up?.
Ethereum community is undergoing an overhaul while there focus on decentralization and security, they are keen to scale up the Ethereum network to practical levels, where all DAPPS have a smooth sail. Announced by Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin in April 2018, Sharding is a method of increasing the number of transactions that a blockchain can process helping in maintaining gas price and reducing transaction confirmation time. Let’s explore in detail what Sharding is? When is Sharding being implemented? And How Ethereum Sharding works?
Sharding is not a new concept and existed even before Blockchain came into existence and applied to any database. As serachcloudcomputing defines – Sharding is a type of horizontal database partitioning that separates very large databases into smaller, faster, more easily managed parts called data shards. The word shard means a small part of a whole.
Yes, its Horizontal Partitioning and not vertical partitioning. Let’s pick an example to know it better –
TABLE 1
| Name | Age | Occupation | City |
| Alex | 32 | Employed | London |
| Appy | 32 | Freelancer | Singapore |
| Chole | 43 | Retired | Berlin |
| Ajay | 43 | Business | Chennai |
In case we partition the table vertically[splitting into two] it results in
| Name | Age |
| Alex | 32 |
| Appy | 32 |
| Chole | 43 |
| Ajay | 43 |
| Occupation | City |
| Employed | London |
| Freelancer | Singapore |
| Retired | Berlin |
| Business | Chennai |
And in case we split horizontally
| Name | Age | Occupation | City |
| Alex | 32 | Employed | London |
| Appy | 32 | Freelancer | Singapore |
| Name | Age | Occupation | City |
| Chole | 43 | Retired | Berlin |
| Ajay | 43 | Business | Chennai |
So on splitting the tables vertically, it creates two new tables that need more space when compared to splitting horizontally by grouping similar one together.
Well, that looks like a simple partitioning of the database? Now imagine this partitioning happening on a decentralized, peer-to-peer network that gets constant updates globally. Hence, Ethereum Sharding differs a bit…let’s dive deep to know more.
As the man, Vitalik Buterin himself quotes –
“Imagine that Ethereum has been split into thousands of islands. Each island can do its own thing. Each of the islands has its own unique features and everyone belonging on that island, i.e., the accounts, can interact with each other AND they can freely indulge in all its features. If they want to contact other islands, they will have to use some sort of protocol.”
Blockchain that is a distributed, decentralized peer-to-peer network consists of a series of nodes. At any given point each node of a blockchain network like Bitcoin or Ethereum stores all states of the network and processes all of the transactions, that helps in high-level security but legitimate scaling issues.
Nodes on such network stores and processes every information/transaction, leading to network straining. With shards in place, one could group similar sets of nodes into one shards that helps in faster processing of the transaction for that specific shard. Basically, you are allowing the system to run multiple transactions parallelly, thereby increasing throughput.
A laymen example could be a “SCHOOL,” where although all students [as nodes] are under same network[ABC School] they are governed by section and class they belong, which have their own set of rules and protocols.
Technically, Ethereum Sharding would be splitting the state [a set of information that represents the “current state” of a system] and history[an ordered list of all transactions that have taken place since genesis] up into
K= O(n/c) partitions
referred to as shards
| Where K = shard, |
| n= size of the ecosystem[in abstract form] assuming that transaction load, state size, and the market cap of a cryptocurrency are all proportional to n. |
| c= size of computational resources, and |
| O= Big O notation characterizes functions according to their growth rates. |
Picking an example, on Ethereum network a sharding scheme
| Shard One | All addresses starting with 0x00 |
| Shard Two | All addresses starting with 0x01 |
| Shard Three | All addresses starting with 0x02 |
Please note that each shard would have its own transaction history and also the effect of transactions in a shard ‘k’ would be limited to the state of shard ‘k.’
For example, if you have a multi-asset blockchain, the sharding scheme could be where each shard stores the processes and balances of the transaction associated with one specific asset. Making it more complicated, could be the ability of one shard to trigger events on another shard referring as cross-shard communication capability.
Before diving into “How” let’s get familiar with the terminologies –
At any given point in time, the complete set of information, i.e., current balances, nonces, smart contract code, transactions, etc. that describes a system. Each transaction initiated could bring the network into a new state.
A set of instructions/actions issued by the individual to change the state of the system.
Data structure concept that helps in organizing large data sets via cryptographic hashes.
A result/produce of a transaction that is kept in a Merkle tree but not stored in the state of a system. For example, Smart contracts logs in Ethereum are kept as receipts in Merkle Trees.
A shard specific block. Just imagine that the transactions are wrapped in a “collation”; similar to block.
The nodes that accept on shard k, that could depend on protocol whether proposers choose which K or are randomly assigned some k.
A collation has a collation header, a short message of the form “This is a collation of blobs on shard k, the parent collation is 0x7f1e74, and the Merkle root of the blobs is 0x3f98ea.”
The agents that could act as both a proposer and collator may be referred to as prolators.
The main chain exists with a role limited to storing collation headers for all shards.
For a complete list of terminology, please refer here.
Sharding would partition all network computational resources into shards, so that a node doesn’t have to process every transaction in the history of the blockchain, in order to make a new transaction or otherwise participate in securing and using Ethereum; instead a node can just participate in a single shard, or more if it so chooses.
Here are the different phases that would help Sharding implemented on Ethereum network. However, this is still under research and subject to change.
Also, note that this is just an explanation to Phase 1 of Quadratic Sharding, Phase 2, 3,4,5 and super quadratic sharding [Ethereum 3.0 ]are currently out of scope.
On implementing Sharding onto an Ethereum network, it would divide/group the nodes into smaller subsets that would have an ability to process a particular set of transaction’s, and also updating the global state of the network. Ethereum breaks down the network into specific shards. Each shard is assigned a specific group of transactions that are determined by grouping specific accounts (including smart contracts) into a shard. Each transaction group has a header and a body that consist of the following.
| Header | The shard ID of the transaction group
|
| State Root | State of the Merkle root of the shard before and after transactions added |
| Body | All of the transactions that belong to the transaction group that is part of the specific shard. |
| Transaction Group Root | It is the Merkle root of all of the transaction groups from the specific shards for that block of transactions |
| Each Block on Ethereum | contains both a state root and the transaction group root. |
So how a Global state update happens with shards in place?
A transaction that occurs within a specific shard, between accounts native to that shard is verified and state of the network changes, updating the storage, account balances, etc. Now comes the task to verify whether the transaction group is valid or not. For this to happen, the pre-state root of the transaction group should match with the shard root in the global state. Once the match occurs, the transaction group is validated, and that updates the global state via a particular shard ID state root.
And where does VMC fit in?
In the Main Blockchain where we publish a contract called as Validator Manager Contract [VMC] with an internal PoS[Proof Of Stake] consensus. The VMC also keeps a record of the shards. During each cycle, the VMC picks a random validator that has the right to create the next block on each shard.
Each shard has a certain number of blocks and transactions, that would NOT BE replicated to the main chain but would be replicated one level down. At each shard level, we have nodes referred to as Collations or a group of transactions, that has a collation header that would be pushed into the VMC. But all the actual transactions happening in the shards, shard states, shard collations would go off-chain.
So the main chain would only have collation headers, and VMC who need to keep track of these PoS signed block header to track the state roots of each shard. Also, the other validators of the shard have to watch VMC all the time for getting latest status and then verify if the transactions are valid too.
In this whole process, VMC for each shard is acting as a light client.
As mentioned by Justin Drake that Casper would be launched first, i.e., in 2019, and Sharding Phase one [Data] and Phase two[Layer] would come in 2020 and 2021 respectively.
However, another team behind Status, a mobile Dapp browser on the Ethereum network, the crew has been building its own sharding client, Nimbus, to address scalability concerns with the blockchain.
Also, another platform Zilliqa has also implemented Sharding by utilizing transaction and computational sharding.
References
Sharding FAQ, Medium@icebearhww, Sharding doc, Blockgeeks, Sharding Roadmap, infographic, prysmatic-labs, trustnodes, Hiswai.
Let’s start with some good news about Ethereum
100,000. The number of refugees served by the World Food Programme’s Ethereum Experiment in Jordan.
16,678. The number of live Ethereum nodes.
1,000,000+. The number of downloaded MetaMask Ethereum browser extensions.
1,552 decentralized applications currently launched on Ethereum.
35,000,000+ unique addresses on the Ethereum blockchain.
30x more Ethereum developers than the next blockchain community.
And now some bad news –
May 20, 2018– Ethereum Network Congestion Doubles Gas Fees as Game dApps Capture $7.5M in 24 Hours
July 03, 2018 – Ethereum (ETH) Network Congested Again, As Market Prices Revive
While good news points to the fact that Ethereum is a treasured network, helping people and snowballing, the bad news highlights the fact that an increase in user base, leads to congestion resulting in price hikes. A quick glance, on major Ethereum congestion issues, in last six months we would find it was mostly because of the transaction of Ethereum based Dapps that affected the transaction throughput hence caused congestion. Bottomline – Ethereum is facing scalability issue. Fortunately, the community is working hard to launch two new improvements Plasma and Sharding that could scale up Ethereum network to support tens of thousands of transactions per second. Let’s explore it in detail –
Every website/software or network intends to support as many users as it can, but unfortunately, the architecture does not support infinite users, Ethereum also faces the same issue. Due to a hard-coded limit on computation per block, the Ethereum blockchain network supports ~ 15 tps[transaction per second]. Now when a new release of Dapps is initiated, the network is flooded with transactions, but due to its architecture, it could only process handful, thereby causing delays and congestion on the network. The technical glitch has been under discussion by community and researchers.
Ethereum blockchain by design uses a combination of software tricks and incentives, which ensures to precisely record who owns what with a central authority. Ethereum is also dependent on a network of nodes, where each node stores the transaction history [entire], the current account balances, storage, and contracts. Overall it is a cumbersome task, leading to an increase in transactions and size with each new block.
Now, the concern is, to strike a balance in finding the key[to validate the transcation] and also grow the number of users [like to purchase stuff online or play games]
Rising the block size could be an option, but then it would throw individuals off the network as not many individuals could fund to facilitate large data nodes. However, the irony is that running a full is the best way to achieve benefits of security and privacy. But full nodes would limit the number of people that could validate the transactions.
In our last post, we mentioned how Bitcoin Scalability Problem could be resolved by a concept called as Bitcoin Lightning Network, similar to the technique is Plasma where the transaction is carried off-chain, and root-chain is responsible for maintaining security and privacy. In the current state, Ethereum, chain of blocks performs computation, storing, transferring and even processing of data, channeling some of the tasks onto a different channel, i.e., off-chaining could help to reduce the load but assures the pros of a decentralized, immutable and distributed network.
Plasma blockchains are a chain within a blockchain. So there would be a root chain[e.g., Ethereum], linked to it would be a child-chain [off-chain, Plasma] that could again spawn its child-chain and this process could continue. So Plasma is many branching blockchains linked to one root blockchain. Plasma is also known as Layer 2 solutions because it is built “on top of” the Ethereum main-chain. It does not require changes to the base level protocol — instead, it exists merely as smart contracts on Ethereum that interact with off-chain software.
The smart contracts are still handled by Ethereum network, the only change that would be seen is the broadcasting of the completed transactions to the public Ethereum chain. So, for example, there are two parties
|
A |
B |
|
Transferring 5$ to B |
|
|
Transferring 10$ to A |
|
|
Transferring 25$ to B |
|
| Broadcast Message |
Transferred 20$ to A |
One could think of a TREE structure that at a set frequency communicates/transfers information with its root-chain.
With off-loading the child-chain gets an added advantage to performing complex computation, helping developers to launch innovative dapps and get more users. One of the most significant advantages of the Plasma chain is that it could run a faster speed, lower cost and all of the data need not be replicated across the entire network.
Let’s pick a conceptual example to know How Plasma works?
Suppose Mike and Alan are keen on playing chess, where the winner receives 5ETH. There could be two possible ways to implement it on a blockchain network –
The plain and simple way of implementing this would be to create a smart contract on root chain[i.e., ethereum], feed the rules, logic, and a track of players moves. Every time Mike and Alan make a move, a transaction is sent out to the contract. And when one of them wins, the contract pays 5ETH to the winner.
By design and execution, this method would work but would be slow and inefficient. For each transaction made they need to pay the gas cost and wait before making the next move until the blocks are mined. Also, imagine if the number of players increases just recently when crypto kitties was launched, and it caused congestion to the network.
On the root-chain, i.e., Ethereum main chain we create a set of smart contracts of our Plasma child-chain. The Plasma root contains the state transition rules [rules, logic, and track of players move, records hashes] and acts as a bridge, which allows players to move assets between the root-chain and the child chain.
Now, is the time to create child-chain. The child chain could have its consensus algorithm and depending upon the consensus it would have validators [i.e., one who validates blocks that the transaction is true or not]. Once the child-chain is active, the validators could schedule a periodic commitment to the root. That means I commit that the most recent block in the child-chain is X”. These commitments are recorded on-chain in the Plasma root as a proof of what has happened in the child-chain.
We have in place the Plasma root; the child chain, now is the time to create the essential components of our game. Here is the twist – the basic components of the game could be built on the Ethereum main chain, and via the Plasma root could be moved onto the child chain, which means Plasma allows you to scale interactions with blockchain-based digital assets, but those assets should be created first on the Ethereum-main chain. Once that is done, you could deploy them onto the child chain that would have the components, logic, rules.
While players interact over a child chain, without even interacting with the main chain that leads to a much smaller node to process transactions, lowering fees and faster processing.
Plasma is in a very nascent phase, while Vitalik research of Minimum viable product [MVP] has the details, the work is still in progress. One of firm OmiseGo in Jan 2018 did launch the information on how they are building Plasma. You can explore them here.
With some unanswered question, we do hope Plasma helps Ethereum in scaling up. However, only time will tell….
Our next article would talk about Sharding and the benefits it has for Ethereum. Stay tuned.
References
MetaMask has been delisted from the Chrome Web Store. Metamask announced on their official twitter handle.
We are unsure of why this is the case and we will update everyone as we get more information. All other browsers are unaffected.
Metamask is one of the most popular ethereum wallets used by millions of users to keep their funds secure with complete access to their private key. MetaMask allows users to run Ethereum dApps right in their browser without running a full Ethereum node.
Users who have already installed Metamask on their chrome browser aren’t affected by this news but new users won’t be able to install Metamask. In the meanwhile, please be careful with any other phishing websites or plugins claiming to be Metamask on Chrome. We will keep you posted on any new updates.
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