Odaily debut | Ethereum core developers start their own business again, Nervos received $28 million in financing from Sequoia and Wanxiang
It is learned that the public chain project Nervos Network announced that it has received US$28 million in private equity financing. Sequoia Capital China Fund and Wanxiang Blockchain are the leading investors in this round. Domestic participating VCs include Matrix Partners China, Jiuhe Venture Capital, Ceyuan Ventures Investment, Fengrui Capital, imToken, Spark Mining Pool, Bixin, Pay Now, etc.; North American institutions including Polychain Capital, FBG Capital, 1kx, etc. also participated in the investment. This round of financing will be used to build products and strengthen the team of Nervos Network, accelerate the development of its enterprise blockchain solutions and the expansion of strategic partners.
More and more people are reflecting on whether Ethereum's vision of becoming a "world computer" is the right direction for the blockchain.
Nervos Network （white paperwhite paper
) positions itself as the "engine of the encrypted economy". Co-founder and COO Lu Guoning said that the biggest difference between it and Ethereum is that the underlying public chain focuses on verification rather than general computing.
From blockchain 1.0 to 2.0, Ethereum tried to put computing on the chain, and now everyone is trying to make a chain that can carry higher computing power. Whether it is improving the consensus algorithm or sharding, it is hoped to enhance network throughput. "At present, the biggest problem encountered by the public chain is performance. But do you really need to use a very strong chain to carry applications all over the world? Can we make all applications in the world use the same database? These are problems that existing DAPPs may encounter in the future.” Nervos Network believes that the essence of blockchain is not computing, but consensus and storage.
Therefore, Nervos Network hopes to separate these two functions. A general-purpose public chain like Ethereum should carry similar missions of "auditing" and "supervising". At present, a large number of side chain solutions are similar, all of which hope to reduce the amount of calculation that the main chain needs to carry and migrate to the side chain; the main chain is responsible for supervision and security.
In the team's vision, the Nervos Network is an encrypted economic network, and the blockchain infrastructure is a part of it. Most of the applications on the chain run on independent application chains, such as games, payment, and transaction settlement.AppChainThe Nervos Network blockchain network is divided into two layers: the first layer is the underlying public chain named CKB (Common Knowledge Base), which is also the underlying core of the entire Nervos Network, and its role is to ensure the security and trust of the upper layer; the second layer is the application chain
, is mainly responsible for processing calculations, and its core component is CITA, the underlying blockchain kernel that adopts the microservice architecture.
Lu Guoning introduced that CITA was originally an open-source consortium chain solution developed by Secret Ape Technology. After optimization by the team, it supports the Public Permission Chain (Public Permission Chain) solution. In the public chain mode, CITA's super nodes are responsible for bookkeeping, and other nodes are responsible for synchronization.
The upper application chain is responsible for computing, and the lower layer focuses on the consensus and security of the underlying storage. The security mentioned here is mainly to prevent the nodes from collaborating to do evil when there are too few nodes in the application chain, such as over-issuing tokens, which will damage the use of users. At the beginning of the construction of the application chain, it is necessary to open a smart contract on the CKB and pledge assets. Once fraud and disputes occur on the application chain, users can submit cryptographic evidence to the smart contract, and the application chain nodes will be punished.
As mentioned above, the same is true for the "routines" of side chain expansion solutions such as Palsma and Lightning Network, but they have not yet been implemented on a large scale. Nervos Network believes that this is mainly because Ethereum has the main chain first and then the side chain, and naturally the side chain is adapted to the main chain. However, the EVM of Ethereum is not suitable for cryptographic security verification of the upper chain. The VM running on the underlying main chain of the Nervos Network is not designed to be Turing complete, but is designed specifically for cryptographic verification. Its purpose is to serve the upper chain and store the state.
"All the calculation process takes place on the second layer. The main chain only needs to verify the cryptographic evidence submitted by the second layer chain. The underlying chain needs to adapt to different second layer chains, which means that the bottom layer needs to be as versatile as possible." This mainly relies on Nervos Network The underlying storage core Cell Model can be understood as a generalization of the UTXO model. UTXO only supports numbers, and Cell can support any type of data structure. Launch School The background of the founding team is one of the important reasons why Nervos Network is favored by capital. The founding team of Nervos Network comes from the core members of enterprises such as Ethereum, imToken and Yunbi. Among them, Jan Xie, the chief architect and head of the research team, was a core R&D member of Ethereum; CEO Terry Tai is the core developer of the digital currency exchange Yunbi; co-founder and COO Daniel Lv ) used to be the CTO of the Ethereum wallet imToken; co-founder and North American team leader Kevin Wang is an online education website for software development
Founder, ex-IBM engineer. At present, the company has close to 70 people, more than two-thirds are engineers and product managers; the underlying CKB team has about 8 people.
At present, Nervos' application chain AppChain has been released, and the underlying chain Nervos CKB is under development and is expected to be launched in the middle of next year.
I am Lu Xiaoming, editor of Odaily. I am exploring the real blockchain. Please add WeChat lohiuming for breaking news and communication. Please note your name, unit, position and reason.
