This year, public chains have seen a collective explosion, from the popular BSC and Heco trading public chains, to Polkadot, a cross-chain network focusing on slot auctions, to Solana, Avalanche, Cardano and many other emerging public chains competing in turn, giving rise to greater market opportunities. When this demand is raised by higher requirements, new public chains come into being.
The market has been paying more attention to public chains, and both capital, project parties and developers are interested in this track. So, what are the differences between them? We will analyze for 4 popular public chains today.
In terms of technical architecture
Solana: PoH （Proof of History）
Unlike most of the sharding+ETH2.0 solutions, Solana has created a unique and innovative PoH mechanism in the public chain. By decoupling the block-out time and status, the mechanism is not limited to the hard requirements of block size and block-out time in the global consensus, and generates a globally available time chain for all nodes through the global clock. The PoH gives participants in the Solana ecosystem more room for expansion, further enhancing and expanding the overall throughput capability.
Polkadot: King of cross-chains
If bitcoin is public chain 1.0, ethereum is public chain 2.0, then polkadot is public chain 3.0. polkadot is designed to break the silos of public chains through cross-chain architecture. polkadot is divided into relay and parallel chains, which realize information transmission between chains through IBC protocol and XCMP protocol respectively. Each sub-chain of this type of project can be compared to a single Ethernet chain, and the project on the chain can interoperate with other sub-chains according to its business needs to create an interoperable value ecology. At present, this kind of cross-chain is more about bridging and mapping existing resources and assets such as ethereum and bitcoin to their own ecology, and synchronizing to cultivate and support their own ecological projects. As the cross-chain public chain technology is more difficult to implement, it also requires more development time.
Avalanche: The Three Chain Structure
Avalanche protocol comes into the public attention by incentive and achieves a significant increase of token price and lock volume. Avalanche is also a smart contract platform, but it has a very innovative architecture with a three-chain structure: X chain, C chain, and P chain. X chain is a transaction chain, mainly dealing with peer-to-peer asset creation and transactions between individuals; C chain is an EVM-compatible smart contract chain, and basic DeFi projects are built on top of C chain; P chain is a platform chain, mainly responsible for token pledging, coordinating network P-chain is the platform chain, mainly responsible for token pledging, coordinating network validators, creating custom subnets, and other matters. Each of the three chains has its own role to play, yet they complement each other, further freeing up Avalanche’s network performance.
AIVERSE: A Dual Chain Network of Metaverse
AIVERSE is an open source public blockchain network with 2 built-in blockchains: E chain and C chain, the addresses of the two chains are not the same (one by one binding for authorization). The transfer of assets is carried out through a cross-chain bridge, and the E chain can call the C chain’s smart contracts.
While C-chain facilitates fast migration of dapps, E-chain supports a distributed ledger platform for smart contracts written in general programming languages (e.g. Java, Go and JavaScript) rather than restricted domain specific languages (DSL). This means that most developers already have the skills needed to develop smart contracts and do not need additional training to learn new languages or DSLs.
At the same time, E Chain supports users to freely form sub-chains (minimum 4 nodes and already synchronized with E Chain main network data) with a choice of consensus mechanisms (POW, PBFT, etc.) when forming.
E Chain
Most existing smart contract blockchain platforms follow an order execution architecture where the consensus protocol.
validation and transaction ordering, which is then broadcast to peer nodes.
Each peer node executes transactions in turn
E chain introduces a new transaction architecture, which we call execute-order-validate. it addresses the resilience, flexibility, scalability, performance and confidentiality challenges of the order execution model by dividing the transaction flow into three steps.
Executing the transaction and checking its correctness, thereby endorsing it.
Sorting transactions by sorting nodes.
Validating transactions against an application-specific endorsement policy before committing them to the ledger
This design is quite different from the order execution paradigm, as transactions are executed before a final agreement is reached on the order.
The application-specific endorsement policy specifies which peer nodes or how many of them are required to guarantee the correct execution of a given smart contract. Thus, each transaction needs to be executed (endorsed) by only a subset of the peer nodes required to satisfy the transaction endorsement policy. This allows parallel execution to improve the overall performance and scale of the system. The first phase also eliminates any uncertainty, as inconsistent results can be filtered out prior to ordering.
From the consensus mechanism
As mentioned above, Solana’s original Proof of History (PoH) mechanism is the main point of the PoH mechanism, where each node on the blockchain does not need to wait for the global state to update, but can generate its own local timestamp. Each verifier node can encode the “ time passing” in a sequence of outputs of the function by computing the function in a fast loop to prove that a transaction actually occurred at a specific time.
Polkadot uses NPoS (Nominated Proof of Stake) as its mechanism for selecting the set of verifiers. It is designed to have both verifier and nominator roles to maximize the security of the chain. Participants interested in maintaining the network can run validated nodes.
Avalanche is a new protocol based on random sampling and sub-stable decision making, implementing a combination of classical consensus and Satoshi Nakamoto consensus. In the process of node validation message, it is not necessary to compare with the whole network nodes, just select most of the N nodes randomly to do the comparison, and the process is repeated by all the nodes in the whole network until consensus is reached.
AIVERSE uses a dual consensus mechanism applied to the C-chain and E-chain networks.
C-Chain uses APOS as its mechanism to select validators. Users become validators by pledging assets and get a higher chance of bookkeeping by the amount of assets pledged. Blocks that pass validation will be added to the blockchain network and rewarded with blocks, and vice versa, penalizing the pledged assets.
E-Chain adopts Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), an algorithm based on strict data proof, which requires at least three stages of information exchange and local consensus to reach the final consistent result. The transaction inspection by endorsement nodes is carried out in fragments (shards) to improve the validation speed.
From ecological construction
Solana and Polkadot are committed to creating ecological richness
Solana officially reveals 368 ecological projects, covering DEX, lending, insurance, NFT, Metaverse, etc. Overall, Solana has many projects online and running well.
According to Polkaproject statistics, there are now more than 510 Polkadot eco-projects, covering all aspects of infrastructure, tools, wallets, stablecoins, DeFi, DApps, and more. And it is still expanding. When the parallel chain really starts working, the ecological number may usher in a larger growth.
Avalanche supports the ecosystem by offering rewards
With the Avalanche Foundation closing $230 million in funding and KyberDMM, the first multi-chain dynamic market maker in its DeFi ecosystem, offering a $5.8 million liquidity bonus in tandem with the launch of Avalanche, it’s fair to say that Avalanche’s incentives are quite tight, which has garnered considerable market attention. The same provides upside momentum for the project’s multi-dimensional data.
AIVERSE builds the foundation for the Metaverse ecosystem
For eco developers, AIVERSE’s support is mainly in the underlying technology and functional components.
On technical aspects.
1、Support generic programing development, saving a lot of cost for technical staff such as Soldity/Rust for development teams, and non-blockchain enterprises can also develop decentralized applications at low cost.
2、Based on the dual-chain network’s characteristics of decentralization, security and efficiency, developers can deploy all parts of the project on one public chain, thus saving the cost of operation and maintenance of the off-chain part.
3、AIVerse supports modular configuration of custom sub-chains with high degree of customization and can interact with the main chain. Developers can sub-chain the on-chain transactions by extending the sub-chain, thus breaking the performance bottleneck.
In terms of functional components.
AIVERSE will provide a suite of features for Metaverse 3D application development, this foundation includes: Beyond Me and Outerverse.
Beyond Me uses the NFT digital avatar creation engine based on Unreal Engine4/5. Everyone will be able to create their own hyperrealistic NFT avatars in the future. Beyond Me will deliver high-resolution facial expressions, gestures and body motions using a single camera, reducing motion capture costs. This innovation will be widely adopted in live streaming, social network, and VR games.
Based on the Beyond Me digital avatar creation engine, AIVERSE Labs has created a smart NFT brand ambassador — Aiv.
Outerverse is a NFT open-world universe developed with Unreal Engine 4/5, with a surreal artwork style,a paradise for creative minds. The first Sky City in the Outerverse world is called “MetaArk”, created by AIV Labs. It is connected by multi-style and unconstrained themes, with a total area of more than 200,000 square meters.
MetaArk will later release its SDKs to users and developers, allowing them to create their own contents.
Future Development
In terms of market cap circulation, Solana’s token SOL has the highest circulating market cap of 22.74 billion, followed by DOT, ATOM, etc. The top 10 list are all relatively well-known cross-chain projects. From Coinmarketcap’s circulating market cap, Cardano, Solana, Polkadot, Avalanche and other new public chains are in the top 20 of the list.
2021 is both the competition for public chains and Metaverse, and companies are starting to layout Metaverse business in the market, both big and small. However, there is no public chain network that is designed for the development of Metaverse and provides decentralized and high performance support for high concurrent applications such as GameFi. Just like a pavilion building, a solid foundation is the first thing to consider.
As a new starter, AIVERSE is not yet among the top 20 market capitalization in circulation, but based on the technical layer, consensus layer and ecological layer analysis, and the project has already completed the development of part of the Metaverse scenario, it is believed that it will be able to usher in greater development opportunities when the growing number of applications accelerates in the future.
Attachment: Comparison of AIVERSE and other public chains’ solutions to the blockchain impossible triangle problem
