Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)

Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)

Taking the evolution of the public chain as the anchor, the development of the blockchain industry can be roughly divided into three stages.

Bitcoin opened the door to "open currency" and liberated people's imagination of decentralized currencies.

Ethereum's smart contracts unleash the potential of applications, and components such as stablecoins, lending agreements, DEXs, and their combinations make decentralized "open finance" a reality.

In the ideal next stage, the scope of "open finance" will be further expanded to cover all high-value data, moving towards an "open network". With the expansion of the scope of applications in the future, the expansion of the number of users and transactions will undoubtedly put forward higher requirements for the load capacity of the blockchain, and expansion and upgrading are imperative.

In order to lead the era of "open network", the leading public chains have come up with their own "supernatural powers" this year to speed up the progress, intending to seize the new ranking of the future track:

In May, Polkadot, known as the "king of cross-chains" and "opener of Web3.0", launched the main network candidate network Polkadot CC1;

In October, the NEAR mainnet, the "king of shards" that can be infinitely expanded, transitioned to the second phase, opening network functions such as token transfer, account creation, participation in verification, voting governance, and launching applications;

In December, the ETH 2.0 genesis block was dug up, marking that Ethereum finally embarked on the road of PoS and expansion;

……

These star public chains that still retain a high degree of attention mainly rely on "three axes": technically, on the premise of ensuring security and decentralization, to tackle scalability; ecologically, to develop languages, development tools and environments, and reduce migration costs Ease of use for developers has been taken into account in other aspects; in terms of positioning, start with a clearer vertical scene, and then talk about the grand narrative of transforming the Internet.

Today, we focus our attention on NEAR, which has experienced rapid ecological development recently.

The reason for paying attention to it is simple: it has everything that ETH 2.0 should have (POS mechanism + high TPS + low Gas) that has been delayed again and again. At the same time, NEAR is very targeted in terms of cross-chain, with the help of Rainbow Bridge (Rainbow Bridge) to achieve interoperability with Ethereum, and supports EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) and a full set of peripheral tools. With such technical support, any user, APP, or developer can complete the transfer from assets to experiences between Ethereum and NEAR without permission.

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Standing on the Rainbow Bridge to meet Ethereum Ecological Developers

At last year's Dragonfly Summit, V God bluntly said: "NEAR is doing a very good job, which makes me anxious." this project.

In our opinion, in addition to being similar to the vision of ETH 2.0, NEAR’s greater threat to Ethereum comes from its cross-chain technology-Rainbow Bridge.

The Rainbow Bridge is the first step towards interoperability between the Ethereum and NEAR networks. There are three things behind this:

• For users and investors of tokens from both parties, assets can be interlinked across chains through the Rainbow Bridge;

• For Ethereum application developers, there is no need to modify the smart contract code, and EVM applications can be directly deployed on the NEAR blockchain platform to achieve a significant performance improvement;

• For DApp developers and users on Ethereum, they can use familiar tools such as wallets to experience ETH 2.0 in advance without abandoning the original community and ecology.

The technical principle of the Rainbow Bridge is that two light clients that can track the state of the chain without a lot of calculations work together: one is an Ethereum light client executed in the Rust language (as a NEAR contract), and the other is a Solidity Language implementation of NEAR light client (as an Ethereum contract). At the same time, the two are verifying their tracking status in a trustless manner, and after confirming the finality, transfer the data to the other party's ecological use through the relay layer. (Odaily Note: Developers who are interested in details, welcome toGithubimage description

A simplified diagram of a light client running with Rainbow Bridge technology

Therefore, Rainbow Bridge has the characteristics of self-trust, no permission, no multi-signature, and complete decentralization. It has been deployed on NEAR's main network and is currently available for private testing by multiple Ethereum DeFi projects. It’s no wonder that NEAR’s product manager Alex Shevchenko (Ph.D. in Physics, former Bitfury executive) confidently believes that “NEAR’s cross-chain technology is 6-9 months ahead of the market.”

From the perspective of commercial promotion, have you noticed that NEAR's cross-chain is very targeted?

Make a comparison. Polkadot, which focuses on the cross-chain concept, currently focuses on cross-chain research and development on the connection between parallel chains (shard chains), which is the collaboration between different application chains in the Polkadot system, which is an isomorphic cross-chain. Unlike Polkadot, NEAR directly targets the Ethereum ecosystem, standing on the rainbow bridge to welcome a large number of Ethereum developers. The technical difficulty of Rainbow Bridge is also greater. It is a heterogeneous cross-chain in the true sense, connecting two independent underlying public chains.

According to Amos Zhang, head of NEAR Asia, the advancement of Rainbow Bridge is only the first step of NEAR’s cross-chain blueprint (asset migration). The second step is to support EVM and realize direct cross-chain calls of contracts (contract migration). It is a peripheral tool that fully supports EVM (experience migration).

For mature developers, NEAR provides support for EVM in the execution environment, so that existing Ethereum contracts can be deployed on NEAR after a few simple steps. (Odaily Note: If you are a developer, enterhttps://github.com/to get related resources. ) For novice developers, NEAR launched an IDE tool (Gitpod) integrated on the webpage, loaded a Docker-based image, selected the programming language/platform version, and automatically installed the relevant components. There is even a terminal with a built-in complete project for developers to modify the code at any time. Developers can create DApps with zero threshold through any application paradigm, which greatly reduces the threshold for developing on NEAR. (Odaily Note: If you are a developer, enterhttps://near.org/to get related resources. )

In terms of smart contract development languages, NEAR supports Rust and AssemblyScript. Rust provides higher security, while AssemblyScript is based on Javascript and has a larger developer community, which facilitates the rapid development of applications on the front end.

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How NEAR Drop works

It can be seen that in order to win the favor of Ethereum ecological developers, NEAR has considered many details in optimizing the development experience.

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Support and strengthen developers with the "Grants + OWC" model

It's not enough just to attract developers to NEAR for development. It is also particularly critical to motivate developers for a long time and provide guidance and non-financial support for native projects. NEAR adopts the dual mode of "Grants + OWC" in incubating and consolidating developers.

Grants are mainly for some infrastructure tools with unclear profit models (such as wallets, indexers, block explorers and other ecological components), and even scientific research projects. Projects can directly apply for funding.

OWC is an international blockchain accelerator for start-up projects and does not need to be bound to the underlying protocol. Each session lasts 12 weeks and includes 15 teams. These teams will validate their entrepreneurial ideas within OWC. OWC provides assistance in product development, KPI setting, market discovery, financing and other aspects for the project.

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Phased results and future layout of NEAR ecology

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NEAR ecosystem map

This picture shows the list of projects that have been, are being and will be built around NEAR. There are many star projects such as Chainlink, Maker, AAVE, IPFS and so on.

Since October, several Ethereum ecological projects such as DEX aggregator 1inch, integrated NFT platform Mintbase, DeFi project Balancer, and stable currency TUSD have announced that they will enter the NEAR ecosystem.

1. After Mintbase migrated from Ethereum to NEAR, it took advantage of NEAR's good scalability, simple development experience and easy-to-use user experience, making NFT available to everyone.

Nate Geier, founder of Mintbase, said when talking about "escape from Ethereum": "In the past, the price of deploying a store on Ethereum was about $2, but now the price has exceeded $250, just creating 5 NFT. It costs about $50. Our vision is to sell various tickets in the form of NFT someday in the future, but this is simply not feasible under the current conditions of Ethereum.” In the comprehensive comparison of Polkadot, Ethereum 2.0, Elrond, EOS, After Cosmos and other platforms, Nate believes that the advantages of NEAR are reflected in: account addresses and contract addresses readable by ordinary people, progressive security, Rust or AssemblyScript contract language, POS consensus, dynamic re-sharding, cheap, fast and easy to use, etc. He also pointed out that NEAR may currently lack an indexer (Odaily note: NEAR has appeared in The Graph's candidate public chain list, and its developer David Kajpust once said that Compound is secretly developing based on different public chains).

2. On November 3, NEAR officially announced that TrustToken, an asset tokenization platform, plans to launch its USD-anchored stablecoin TrueUSD (TUSD) on the NEAR mainnet, which is expected to be launched in late 2020 or early 2021.

The current market value of TUSD exceeds 330 million US dollars, ranking among the top five global stablecoins, and is supported by more than 80 exchanges and more than 20 OTC merchants around the world. During the DeFi boom period, TrustToken increasingly felt that the congestion of Ethereum hindered its product functions and usability. Therefore, it is expected to bridge to NEAR safely and without permission through the Rainbow Bridge, so as to keep the gas fee at a low level and increase the transaction processing speed. From the minute level to 1 second for block generation and 3 seconds for finality confirmation, it supports a wider range of DeFi, NFT, prediction, and payment scenarios, and becomes the basis for more open network use cases.

3. Just on November 25, the head aggregation DEX 1inch announced that the automated market maker protocol Mooniswap developed by it will be deployed on NEAR at the same time to explore the various possibilities of interoperability between NEAR and Ethereum.

According to 1inch CTO Anton Bukov (who was responsible for the development of Rainbow Bridge at NEAR and is still guiding the high-level design of Rainbow Bridge technology), it is planned to launch the Mooniswap DEX (decentralized exchange) based on the NEAR sharding model and infinitely scalable next year. ). He explained the reason for choosing NEAR to build a new sharding DEX: "Building a DEX on a non-sharded blockchain, not only the blockchain is the bottleneck of expansion, but also smart contracts. Non-homogeneous sharding blockchains (such as Polkadot, ETH 2.0) will not be much faster than non-sharded blockchains, because smart contracts will not be automatically sharded, and all transactions must be completed on a single shard.”

In this regard, NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin once said in a recent AMA, "DeFi is our preferred field, and NEAR can provide 1-2 seconds of finality and low transaction costs. It is expected to attract the attention of a group of decentralized trading platforms.” Through the execution environment of Rainbow Bridge and EVM, DeFi projects on Ethereum such as Mooniswap, Balancer, and Aave can be deployed on NEAR at low cost and quickly.

In addition to the above projects, second-hand mobile device trading platform Glyde (initiated by PCS Wireless, a traditional mobile phone seller with an annual revenue of more than 500 million US dollars), horse racing game platform Zed Run, pixel chain game Berry Club that introduces liquidity mining, digital Native projects such as the card (NFT) trading platform Paras and the open market protocol Flux have been launched on the NEAR network.

Take Flux, which launched its mainnet on August 22 (the first protocol built and launched based on the NEAR protocol) as an example, dynamic sharding, random beacons, complete development tools, and the interoperability of Ethereum are the reasons why Flux chose NEAR reason. With such underlying support, users on Flux can create and trade prediction markets with a transaction fee of less than $0.01.

Sasha, director of business development at NEAR, said that it is estimated that 17 applications will land on the NEAR mainnet before February 2021, including the mobile game peer-to-peer competition platform OP games, the trader social network Yanda, the fan interaction platform Arterra, the chain game Hash Rush, DAO collaboration tool Abridged et al.

This scale of underlying migration reflects the recognition of NEAR by upper-level applications. While benefiting from its technical advantages, it also enriches the NEAR ecosystem.

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The Nightshade protocol behind unlimited expansion

In addition to the Rainbow Bridge, there is another important technical cornerstone of the NEAR expansion ecology: to achieve expansion through the original sharding technology.

D1 Ventures, an investment institution deeply involved in DeFi, once compared the technical differences between NEAR and Ethereum 2.0, Polkadot, Cosmos and other projects in detail. According to the difference in structure, D1 Ventures divides the underlying Layer 1 public chain into two categories - "DApp chain" and "cross-chain platform". The "DApp Chain" hopes that all DApps will be built on a common Layer1, sharing the security and performance of the underlying chain. The DApp itself will not have an independent chain, and there is no need to consider the security and governance of the underlying chain. Such public Typical representatives of chains are Ethereum and NEAR.

Different from Ethereum, NEAR's intra-block sharding solution (also known as Nightshade night shadow protocol) is quite creative, and its architecture and technical implementation are also different.

Specifically, from the perspective of fragmentation structure, Ethereum 2.0 and Polkadot are composed of a beacon chain (relay chain) and multiple fragmentation chains. Chain) confirmation, resulting in delays in cross-shard transactions, and the expansion capability of the entire system is also limited by the expansion capability of the beacon chain itself. However, NEAR does not adopt the architecture of maintaining multiple shard chains, but shards within the block. Each verification node only needs to maintain one chain, and only one block is needed to confirm cross-shard transactions, which solves the problem of sharding. The transaction delay problem of the chain structure.

At the same time, the Yeying protocol also supports dynamic re-fragmentation, and the number of fragments will be dynamically adjusted according to the network usage. Each shard can already support a capacity of 1000 transactions per second under the current unoptimized condition. In addition, NEAR's sharding is horizontally scalable, which means that 10 shards can reach 10,000 TPS, and 100 shards can reach 100,000 TPS. Theoretically, there is no upper limit to the number of shards.

In the introduction of the Night Shadow protocol, it also includes details on how to confirm the validity of the state and data availability, the punishment mechanism for different malicious behaviors, the work content of the two roles of the block producer and the verification node, and interested readers can find it inhttps://mp.weixin.qq.com/Learn more about.

From the perspective of design concept, Yeying Protocol is not only solving the scalability of the public chain, but also trying to solve problems such as composability, cross-shard communication delay, and cross-shard transaction fees. These attempts earned NEAR the reputation of "King of Sharding".

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NEAR is the future Ethereum 2.0

At this point, you may find that the stories NEAR and Ethereum 2.0 are telling are almost the same, both are POS consensus mechanism + expansion, and both point to high TPS and low Gas fee. NEAR has what Ethereum 2.0 should look like.

Due to the many historical issues left over from the 1.x version, Ethereum 2.0 has "bounced" many times. Judging from the previous roadmap, phase 0 of Ethereum 2.0 only supports pledge deposits, phase 1 may start to deploy shards, and phase 2 will activate transfers. It is estimated that it will take several years to complete the whole process. (Odaily Note: Due to the slow progress of Ethereum sharding development, in a recent core developer meeting, Vitalik said that he may abandon the shard expansion plan in Ethereum 2.0 and participate in the rollup vertical expansion plan. The deployment of shards may Will be postponed to Ethereum 3.0.)

At the same time, how to smoothly introduce the existing ecology into version 2.0 is also a major problem facing Ethereum. For example, under the network structure of 2.0, how to confirm the order of transactions across shards and take into account the composability of DeFi remains to be solved.

During the window period when Ethereum 2.0 is still a "castle in the air", other public chains have the opportunity to speed up their catch-up and undertake the overflow value of Ethereum. NEAR has made good use of its latecomer advantage. Since the project's launch in August 2018, it took NEAR only 26 months to realize the progressive release of the mainnet (PoA version, restricted phase, phase 2).

In October of this year, the NEAR mainnet has successfully transitioned to the second phase, and basically all network functions are open. Now anyone can send or receive tokens, create accounts, participate in validation, vote in governance, launch applications, or otherwise use the NEAR Network.

At the second Town Hall online community meeting on November 3, several core members disclosed the latest development progress of core parts such as sharding and rainbow bridge. Lianchuang Alex Skidanov said that NEAR will start sharding on the test network, and plans to test the sharding function on the test network in 2021. After the function is complete, the community will decide when to start sharding on the main network. Currently, one shard can process 1,000 transactions per second. After the technology matures, the main network will be able to double the TPS by increasing the number of shards.

Yilong also said that the development of Rainbow Bridge has entered the third stage and is currently undergoing private testing on the main network, and version 1.0 will be released later, and everyone can use this tool in a trustless manner. At the same time, NEAR is working hard to introduce the EVM. Some early work has been completed, and the beta version has been released this month. At that time, developers will be able to deploy contracts using existing Ethereum tools on the test network.

In terms of development progress alone, network expansion through NEAR + ETH 1.x seems to come earlier than the full implementation of ETH 2.0.

However, today’s public chain competition is no longer purely a technical comparison. Ecological fragmentation and the gap in scale are the huge gap between the frontrunners and the latecomers that is difficult to bridge. Regarding the relationship between technology and ecology, Amos believes, “This is a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Most of the new chains with better scalability do not have the large-scale financial infrastructure of Ethereum, and lack the opportunity for organic growth. The developer community cannot continue to develop more applications, NEAR does not want to subvert Ethereum, but pragmatically chooses a development path of win-win cooperation.”

NEAR intends to use the scalability of the bottom layer, the optimization of the middle layer, and the mature tools of the application layer to provide developers and users with a simple and friendly experience, and to try out the functions of Ethereum 2.0 in advance.

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The competitive landscape of public chains under the "open network"

From ecological construction to technical support such as cross-chain + sharding, NEAR is not limited to competing with Ethereum. The next era of "open network" may accommodate less than ten mainstream public chains. But the question is, which public chain will open the "open network" first?

The current "King of Public Chain" naturally has the heart to defend his title.

In the early morning of November 5th, the Ethereum 2.0 version deposit contract was officially released; on December 1st, Ethereum officially embarked on the road of upgrading to cure the age-old disease of "slow and expensive". Everyone can foresee that as DeFi expands its boundaries, carries higher value, and other on-chain application fields take over DeFi, it is impossible not to expand. However, the ecological scale of Ethereum at the level of tens of billions of dollars is both an advantage and a burden, which makes Ethereum hesitate and move slowly every time it takes a step.

The new generation of public chains have technical advantages over Ethereum 1.x, and different advantages and backgrounds also determine the positioning of different public chains.

NEAR's team members have experience in continuous successful entrepreneurship, sharding engineers, etc. Almost all development members come from companies such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc., and have world-class computer competition backgrounds. They have won 4 ACM-ICPC programming contest world champions, 6 Medals and 12 finals experience. (Note: ACM-ICPC is the world's highest-level college student computer competition.)

Lianchuang Yilong was the main code contributor of the Google TensorFlow artificial intelligence open source project, and served as the project director of the Google Deep Learning Group. Lianchuang Alex worked for Microsoft and joined memSQL in 2011 as the No. 1 engineer. As an architect and engineering director, he led the development of the only large-scale commercial-grade sharding database, which is used by companies such as Uber, Goldman Sachs, and Samsung.

Such a team endows NEAR with technical expertise such as "sharding expansion + ease of use + interoperability", and at the same time formulates "the fastest path for creators (developers, entrepreneurs) to enter the market" (quoted fromNEAR official website) business positioning. As an open network platform that accelerates the development and implementation of DApps, NEAR hopes to make the difficult-to-understand blockchain approachable.

Under NEAR's vision of an open network, any business involving value transmission can be implemented using blockchain. Amos believes that in the future, there will not be only one public chain of Ethereum, but four or five Layer 1 public chains that can interoperate across chains will cooperate and coexist. In an open-source, inclusive and open blockchain world, only by learning from each other and working together can the industry make great progress.

Specific to the market strategy, NEAR will first bridge the financial facilities on Ethereum to NEAR, break the ecological barriers, and realize corner overtaking; then at the level of open finance, build a variety of applications for C-end users, such as The content platform, online collaboration platform, etc. that can reward the up owner; finally open the era of open network and return the ownership of data to users.

Odaily will continue to pay attention to when the star public chain represented by NEAR will break through and what changes it will bring to the industry.