Jia Yaoqi, Technical Director of Parity Asia, introduced the links based on Substrate development and the popular projects of Polkadot.
Original title: “Distributed Classroom: Parity Foundation Jia Yaoqi talks about Polkadot’s ecology and technology! 》
Sorting out: Fenbushi Capital
Polkadot, launched in May of this year, is known as the “king of cross-chain” and is also known as Ethereum’s rival. So, do you really understand the public chain project of Polkadot? Is its technology really that amazing?
Today, Dr. Jia Yaoqi, Asia Technical Director of Parity Foundation, will talk about Polkadot’s technology and ecology, and unveil the mysterious Polkadot project for us.
Speaking of Polkadot, everyone will think of cross-chain and compare it with Cosmos. In fact, the two are different: Cosmos uses a Hub-and-Zone (central hub-zone) model (Cosmos is autonomous in different zones and is connected by Hub), while Polkadot uses Relay Chain/Parachain (in Relay chain/parachain), the relay chain can maintain the security of each parachain. But this year, as everyone became more and more aware of Polkadot’s ecology and future plans, it was discovered that Polkadot’s real corresponding system is ETH2.0, because Polkadot does not only do sharding and cross-chain. Today I want to focus on the Substrate blockchain development framework. Those who are familiar with us know that we developed Substrate in early 2018, and more than 90% of Polkadot’s code is developed from Substrate .
With the support of Substrate, users can develop parachains or make their own chains. For example, the Polkadot DeFi project on the market is a chain developed by Substrate to provide liquidity for mortgage assets, which can be connected to the Polkadot system in some way. In the Polkadot ecology, Substrate is a very important point, which can help the underlying developers to develop new chains in less time.
You can think of Substrate as the Solidity of Ethereum. When we reviewed history, we found that BTC, as the first generation technology, can only accomplish the mission of decentralized digital payment. It is also digital gold and has the function of store of value. As a second-generation technology, Ethereum can be programmed and developed smart contracts on it. Polkadot can be used as the third generation, an evolution of the blockchain beyond the smart contract system . Based on Substrate, developers can develop more powerful blockchain applications on it. Since 2015, we are wondering what more interesting applications will be developed on Ethereum? This year it was confirmed that this application is DeFi, and the DeFi application on Ethereum is still very marketable. If you have used Solidity, you will find that only integers can be manipulated on Ethereum’s smart contracts. Therefore, with limited programming space, developers can develop applications such as MakerDAO/Dai/Compound/Uniswap, which is amazing.
Substrate has several advantages that other blockchain development frameworks do not have. Next, it will be divided into off-chain working machines, on-chain governance, on-chain upgrades, parallel chains, and cross-chain interaction. I will introduce them to you one by one. Polkadot can be regarded as an operating system for developing blockchain applications, and Substrate is a framework for blockchain development.
First talk about Polkadot’s off- chain working machine , which corresponds to ETH’s Chainlink. Most public chains that have recently emerged are actually smart contract chains, failing to break through the boundaries of Ethereum, but saying that throughput and TPS are higher. If Ethereum wants to get the data of the exchange, it must be connected to the oracle machine so that the oracle machine can pass the off-chain data up. Uploading off-chain data to the chain itself is costly and inefficient. On the other hand, the usability of these off-chain data is very low, and the oracle does not support customized data (such as weather forecast data). In Substrate, there is an off-chain worker module, and developers can directly correspond to the API. Verifier nodes will easily obtain off-chain data, and off-chain data is not limited to exchange data. If a consensus can be reached on and off the chain, the off-chain data will be easily uploaded to the chain.
On-chain governance is also the hottest and most concerned track of Ethereum investment. Including YFI and Sushiswap, the hottest DeFi projects before, they are all emphasizing on-chain governance. But doing on-chain governance on Ethereum will have the problem of high costs. It takes a few dollars to dozens of dollars to complete transactions, signing and voting on the chain. This is why a lot of governance has been changed off-chain: after the off-chain vote is formed, programmers then modify the parameters and the code is transferred to the chain. The current smart contracts cannot achieve the fluency required for on-chain governance. And Substrate’s on-chain governance module can provide a more efficient model, and can ensure that the cost of information transmission is very low. Ethereum’s on-chain governance usually involves voting-writing code-passing it to the chain-and then modifying the logic, which is somewhat inefficient. Substrate can be directly upgraded on the chain: when everyone votes to decide which new function to use, the developer can write that part of the code early and audit it well. When the voting is completed, the governance upgrade on the chain is also completed, and the corresponding parameters and logic will be changed accordingly. Polkadot can avoid the chaos caused by off-chain voting, writing code off-chain and uploading it.
When everyone is developing a public chain, upgrading on the chain has always been a difficult problem to solve. For example, after the unsuccessful hard fork of Bitcoin in 2017, everyone’s basic consensus is that no major upgrades will be made. Every upgrade of Ethereum is accompanied by controversy. If Ethereum is to carry out a hard fork, it must take a lot of effort and coordinate several months in advance. After all, the cost of upgrading is very high. In addition, no matter from the business level (to develop more business scenarios), as well as the security vulnerability level (which needs to be patched all the time), the code written by developers and teams will never be perfect. Security vulnerabilities do not mean that the team is not professional enough. It is the computer industry. The more code is written, the more security vulnerabilities usually increase. At present, the smart contract chain I mentioned above will encounter problems such as patching and upgrading.
Because at that time, developers generally still refer to Ethereum when doing public chains, and will not consider upgrades, which has certain limitations of the times. At present, both the domestic and foreign communities of Polkadot have not realized the advantages of Polkadot, and simply regard Polkadot as a cross-chain protocol. The purpose can only be to use assets on other chains in a certain way. Come in. From a technical point of view, Polkadot brings a qualitative improvement to the development work of blockchain practitioners. When you use the Substrate framework to develop a blockchain, the development and operation and maintenance costs are much lower. Because developers only need to select Polkadot and ready-made modules (EVM/WASM) on the smart contract and apply them directly. On the other hand, Polkadot’s maintenance cost is very low. So, what does Polkadot bring to the entire blockchain industry and ecology? In fact, I think it is more of an imagination. Because Polkadot’s Substrate breaks through the limitations of Solidity, it is no longer limited to only token transactions. Because the on-chain and off-chain are connected, upgrading is no longer a problem, and the supported functions are not just smart contracts, so the public chain can try to support more complex algorithms.
Everyone is more concerned about the issues of parachain and parachain slot auctions. Let me answer here: The process of parachain going online is like this: Rococo (a relay chain test network deployed for testing parachains), then Kusama, and finally Polkadot. Rococo, a parachain test network, has many teams that can access it. If it goes well, the Polkadot project will be deployed first on Kusama. Parachain means that different chains are connected to the relay chain through slots. But in fact, cross-chain interaction is between chain and chain and does not need to go through the relay chain. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum will be connected to the parachain and then to the relay chain through bridges. Currently, BTC and ETH related to the bridge are under active development.
In the future, there will be two types of parachains. One is a commercial slot, which users can get through auction . The prerequisite for obtaining the card slot is to lock the token first, and the user needs to lock his DOT for 6 months to 2 years. Locking tokens will cause losses to users: there is no pledge income, and there is no liquidity. The other is the charity slot, which is equivalent to providing more data and functions that can be used and interacted with for the parachain team. One of them is the bridged parachain of Ethereum. Developers can manipulate assets on Ethereum through cross-chain interaction. It is called the charity chain because the chain itself does not issue new tokens but uses DOT for settlement. Commercial parachains may be issued tokens or DOT/USDT discounted back to users to make up for users’ lost pledge income and liquidity.
In the future, if the team cannot get the slot, there will be the following solutions: the first is that the team can go to Kusama ; the second is parallel threads . Once the user takes a picture of the slot to deploy the parachain, it will take at least half a year. Parallel threads refer to subdividing the parachain into blocks, and only auction the position corresponding to a block. For example, some projects do not have to occupy the parachain slot all the time, they only need to periodically send a block to the relay chain through parallel threads, such as the Lightning Network and other Layer 2 projects. The third type is that some parachains are smart contract chains. Deploying smart contracts on them can also enjoy the advantages of cross-chain . However, the team needs to design a good economic model to make the project and the token on the chain interact well. If some projects want to migrate DeFi from Ethereum to Polkadot, the best way is to find a smart contract parachain and deploy their own smart contract corresponding to Solidity. The fourth is to continue to run the Substrate chain first, and bridge to the Polkadot system in some way in the future.
The Web3 Foundation has contributed a lot to promoting the construction of the Polkadot ecology. For example, the Web3 Foundation has so far awarded Web3 grants to more than 100 teams. Parity ‘s Substrate Builder Program is to help project parties that already have teams and products, and will provide these teams with services such as technical support/marketing/business cooperation. The Delivery Partner Program seeks to cooperate with community teams or large technology providers, allowing them to build alliance chains or private chains for large companies or local governments. Let’s talk about Parity. The blockchain system used in the backstage of the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize winners World Food Program organization was developed by Parity since 2018. Currently, Parity is also helping the German Ministry of Energy to develop a blockchain system. In addition, everyone is more familiar with the Web3 training camp, which is co-organized with Wanxiang Blockchain. The training camp is the incubation of 15 outstanding entrepreneurial projects in Asia selected by Parity and the Foundation. In addition to technical/business-related/community-related coaching for entrepreneurial projects, it will also match-up and cooperate with some institutions.
So what are the current projects on Polkadot?
DeFi: Acala, Stafi, Centrifuge
DID aspect: Kilt
Storage: Crust
Privacy: Phala, Advanca
Smart Contract: Moonbeam, Plasm
Although DeFi has been very popular in recent months, everyone, whether it is an individual or a foundation, wants to promote Polkadot to the direction of Web 3.0. The concept of Web 3.0 is very large, and everyone’s definition is different; but it will not change its user-facing and peer-to-peer characteristics. Many public chains currently online are born for DeFi; Polkadot focuses more on Web 3.0, so non-DeFi projects will also be supported. Compared with other DeFi projects, Acala/Stafi is slightly innovative in algorithm. The most intuitive difference is (compared to Ethereum) that it increases liquidity for mortgaged assets. While you mortgage assets, the system can also help synthesize assets. Centrifuge is a project in which assets are chained, tokenized , and then mortgaged/borrowed. Although Centrifuge will encounter regulatory risks, if it can be done well, the value is very great.
DID ( Decentralized Identity) currently has no clear application scenarios, so there are few such projects in the Polkadot ecosystem. Polkadot itself has an off-chain working machine mechanism, and the chain itself can get off-chain data, so the system will have relatively less demand for oracles. However, in the world of Web3, DID is still very important: KYC (condition review and filing of account holders) and identity verification on the chain are required for cross-chain.
Substrate itself can store data on IPFS through the interface, and the interfaces are all connected to each other. The current community project Crust is doing something similar to Filecoin. However, such storage projects are facing issues such as whether they can have long-term incentive mechanisms and models and how to make profits in the future. As early as 2000, peer-to-peer file transfer networks became popular, and DHT and BitTorrent were both products of that time. However, due to profit issues and copyright issues, these applications have been shattered one after another. Now another big challenge for storage projects is that each country has very strict data control. For example, Europe has GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Therefore, storage projects are currently facing the problem of how to overcome supervision.
Everyone’s intuition for blockchain is that its application scenario is the financial system, but blockchain is too slow to be a financial system, and the data is public. If the blockchain is to evolve into Web 3.0, it is bound to carry the functions of the current and next-generation Internet. If you want to have current and next-generation Internet functions (such as Facebook or Didi), this system needs storage and computing and privacy protection. There are fewer privacy projects in the Polkadot ecology, and it may also be related to the entire blockchain industry. If you have participated in IDO (Initial DEX Offering), go to Uniswap to bid for some tokens, you will find that this is the dark forest. The moment you click the button, many good opportunities are preempted by the robot, and the price is already high when you buy the token. At the same time, all your transaction information is public, and you don’t know which node the smart contract is running on. The sum of all these details makes people think about it. Currently, some projects on Polkadot are using new cryptography technology to protect user privacy, such as Advanca .
We will develop many EVM components to help the smart contract chain on Polkadot , such as Moonbeam . If you need to deploy smart contracts, you can deploy them on Moonbeam; however, EVM does not constitute a technical moat. If someone wants to build a parachain, they can choose the corresponding EVM components, and there will be no technical barriers. There is a trend now that when parachains compete with each other, each parachain will become an “all in one” chain (want to do everything). Because the development of the industry is at an early stage, no one will think clearly about the application scenarios and profit models, so developers will naturally be big and comprehensive. After the entire framework is built, the developer will see what effective applications will come out.
On the whole, no one can really predict what the Polkadot ecology can do in the future. If you have a good project, you can come to Polkadot and have a try with Substrate. Today’s startups are more realistic and will consider whether this public chain is useful or not, and consider what assets are on the platform. This is why DeFi entrepreneurs flock to Ethereum. However, entrepreneurs still need to have a calm mind and the idea of trying more. Maybe they will succeed in Polkadot.
Source link: mp.weixin.qq.com
