Over the past few years, blockchain technology has made amazing advances in popularity, leading to the emergence of large-scale special blockchains: Ethereum offers smart contracts, Litecoin is five times faster than Bitcoin, Zcash is implementing zero-knowledge proof, and so on. In a past post, I talked about what’s preventing cryptocurrencies from reaching a larger audience. In this article, I will explain in a simple way how connecting all of these blockchains together can solve their major problems. This interconnection is called the Blockchain Internet, and it stands for a network that allows data and transactions to flow from one blockchain to another without trust.
Connection encryption bin
Today, each blockchain has its own identity, community, consensus algorithms, and actors (miners, equity holders…) to keep the network safe. . Because individual blockchains evolve within their own ecosystems, they don’t profit from each other. In fact, they are competitors. Bitcoin (BTC), for example, has become less secure since miners decided to mine Bitcoin Cash (BCH) instead. In terms of the number of miners, this shift is not a big deal for Bitcoin, but it could compromise the security of blockchain with smaller communities.
Transactions across ecosystems cannot be implemented without relying on the usual centralized third-party platforms. For example, investments based on Ethereum tokens cannot be made directly through Zcash (ZEC) and the high degree of confidentiality of its data. Data transfer between ecosystems is another challenge that needs to be addressed. Several companies have now developed their own private alliance chains to use the technology to improve internal processes. Imagine merchant M using private chain technology to manage the logistics of goods. Or imagine delivery company P using private chains to track its trucks and packages. It is useful to have party P’s data available to party M so that Party M can track its goods until they are delivered to its customers. Now from the customer’s point of view, tracking goods purchased from M and shipped by P on a public chain is also very valuable. Today, the workflow is not perfect or transparent, nor is it trust-free. It only works in a world where blockchains (public and private) are interconnected.
Polkadot, a protocol that allows individual blockchains to exchange information with each other
Polkadot wants to unite blockchains together
Polkadot is a Web3 Foundation initiative developed by Parity Technologies that aims to make blockchains connected, but not limited to. I’ll explain the goals of the agreement and the solutions it brings. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll keep it simple. You can also read the white paper or its abbreviated version to learn more about the agreement.
Polkadot enables developers and businesses to leverage its protocols to build blockchains, known as parachains. As long as these parallel chains are based on Polkadot, they will share the same proof-of-authority (PoA) consensus. Because this type of consensus is embedded in Polkadot, parallel chain developers can focus on the specificity of their respective blockchains. All parallel chains are seamlessly connected to a generic blockchain called a relay chain, which acts as a link between them all.
Since Ethereum is Turing-complete, it should be one of the easiest blockchains to bridge. The Polkadot whitepaper explains how it is possible to connect the Ethereum main network to the Polkadot network through so-called break-in and break-out contracts. In order to transfer data from Ethereum to Polkadot parallel chains, partial verifiers either need to run full nodes on the Ethereum main network and listen for logs of specific contracts, or they need to have a mechanism to receive proof of transactions from bound third party full nodes. In the latter case, the verifier would not need to run the entire blockchain, but would rely on Merkle Proof to verify the transaction. In order to ensure the canonicality of transactions, verifiers need to wait for a minimum number of block confirmations before broadcasting transactions on the relay chain.
In order to send messages from Polkadot to Ethereum, one can give certain verifiers the right to pledge their DOT to a rollover transaction. An inward contract that knows a list of authorized verifiers can create a transaction after collecting a specified number of verifier signatures.
In the case of Bitcoin, it doesn’t seem impossible to have some Polkadot verifiers running multi-signed wallets and transferring transactions across the Bitcoin blockchain. However, some restrictions can reduce the security of such transfers, such as the number of signatures accepted by bitcoin wallets (typically no more than 16). Unlike dedicated bridging ethereum contracts, Bitcoin wallets do not allow programmatic editing of the list of authorized verifiers. This limitation can be circumvented by developing a bridge wallet specifically designed for this purpose.
In short, most existing blockchains can connect to Polkadot networks thanks to the existence of specific Bridges. Bridging ordinary blockchains may not be as straightforward as Ethereum, but it is possible. While exchanging information with Polkadot’s parallel chains, these blockchains can retain their existing consensus types as well as network security participants. Whether or not to develop a bridge will depend on the use case and needs. Parity Technologies has opened source a bridge that can connect blockchains to other arbitrary Parity chains by authority-proven consensus. Read this article to learn more about this use case, as Oracle Network is already adopting a modified version of the library.
advantage
The ultimate goal of Polkadot is to connect blockchains together. The protocol has several key advantages and is particularly interesting for developers willing to build blockchains on top of it.
The most obvious advantage of this protocol is merge security. Developers don’t need to create a community of miners/verifiers to secure the blockchain: existing collections of verifiers and nominees take care of that.
The second big issue is the extensibility that Polkadot allows. When I wrote this post, Bitcoin and Ethereum were the most popular blockchains, both based on proof-of-work consensus. Both have low throughput and suffer from network congestion at the same time. As a result, its users face higher transaction fees and longer broadcast times for transactions. Each Polkadot parallel chain should serve a single use case, similar to the sharding concept. The parallelism of these chains (hence the name) and the use of consensus authority proofs not only helps improve the throughput of the network, but also presents a huge advantage in terms of energy waste compared to ordinary blockchains based on proof of work.
Although difficult at first glance, the Polkadot protocol is designed to be as simple and neutral as possible. Any blockchain technology can be built on top of this protocol as long as it can provide proof of validity for transactions. Independent of the underlying parallel chain, the protocol is perfectly compatible with private federation chains. In fact, some information can be encrypted and unreadable to the checker or validator while still benefiting from their work. However, companies can share proprietary information externally as needed. Recall from the previous example that the whereabouts of the package should only be disclosed to two specific parties. Thanks to asymmetric encryption, the location information can be read by both the e-commerce merchant that sends the goods and the consumer that receives the goods. To them, only this information is readable; transactions encrypted with another key remain unreadable.
Polkadot is not the only protocol hoping to unite blockchains. Protocols such as Cosmos, Blocknet and Aion are also actively working to establish blockchain Internet. The next article will be devoted to comparing these protocols.
Original link: medium.com/thibauts/p… Author: Thibaut S translation & editing: Zhang Ling & Elisa articles: the etheric fang lovers (https://ethfans.org/ajian1984/articles/845)