Everscale Deep Tech: advantages of multi-blockchain networks 📊

As a part of the new Everscale Deep Tech rubric, a fresh article on the advantages of multi-blockchain networks has been published. In the first article three such platforms were compared: Everscale, Cosmos and Avalanche.

The second article provides a brief overview of the three categories of blockchains with examples:

1️⃣— Bitcoin, Litecoin, ZCash. The main purpose of these platforms was to create some sort of decentralized version of money.

2️⃣— Ethereum, Tezos, EOS. The main purpose of these platforms is enabling the creation of decentralized applications via programmable logic.

3️⃣— Everscale, Cosmos, Avalanche. Thanks to the multichain network architecture and the possibility of horizontal scaling, they all give developers the tools needed to create their own blockchains.

The article describes the advantages of multi-blockchain networks and also presents a dynamic animation depicting how Everscale blockchain works in practice for different types of applications: exchange, social media app and food delivery app, depending on their features.

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New Deep Tech article 🗂

In the third Deep Tech article we can see a parallel between the evolution of blockchain technology and computer CPU technologies.

We focus in our post on the blockchain's evolution:

🛑The idea of storing data in a chain was formulated back in 1979 (Merkle tree), in 1991 the hashes were linked into a chain, where the last cell of a hash becomes part of the next block
🛑In 1998, software engineer Wei Dai developed a prototype of digital currency called B-money
🛑In 2008, a Bitcoin whitepaper was published. BTC was a breakthrough because it made transferring digital money possible without the participation of centralized intermediaries, In addition, transactions are carried out anonymously
🛑Problems with first-generation blockchains: high fees, slow transactions. Each subsequent update was aimed at increasing bandwidth, and increased scalability led to vulnerabilities. Limited functionality and low ecologicity of PoW blockchains
🛑The Ethereum blockchain appeared in 2014, ushering in the smart contract generation of blockchains which have helped to create a broad infrastructure for a complex and narrowly focused technology
🛑The next generation of blockchains focused on improving scalability, reducing the cost of commissions and enabling cross-chain transfers
🛑From the very beginning, the Solana network was built on the innovative PoS consensus
🛑In the 4th generation Near blockchain each segment is supported by its own dedicated network of validators, and all these segments work in parallel
🛑The fifth generation is the current stage: the trend towards increasing scalability
🛑Everscale achieves almost infinite scalability with the help of three distinctive solutions: dynamic sharding, multithreading and distributed programming

🔗 Go to the article to learn about the future of the blockchain and CPU technologies (9 min read)

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New article in Everscale Deep Tech 🗂

The fourth article describes the blockchain trilemma, compares Everscale and other blockchains through the lens of decentralization, security, and scalability, and describes the unique solutions Everscale uses to improve network security.

➕ The blockchain trilemma states that DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) can provide only two of the three benefits — decentralization, security and scalability

➕ The goal of modern blockchains is to create a secure network with high transactional throughput, but this contradicts the trilemma, since scalability is inversely proportional to decentralization, given identical security parameters

➕ A blockchain that satisfies the trilemma strikes a balance between speed, security, and scalability. However, most blockchains cannot optimize all three characteristics simultaneously, which requires compromises

➕ Ethereum is an example of this, where decentralization and security prevail over scalability. However, Ethereum is working to solve the scalability problem using rollups and combinations of sharding mechanisms

➕ Everscale uses a consensus mechanism based on Byzantine Fault Tolerance Technology (BFT) with two confirmation sessions: main and per shard. The mechanism has a vulnerability that can be exploited by attackers to send a malicious block into the masterchain

➕ To improve Everscale security while maintaining high speed and sufficient decentralization, the SMFT (Soft Majority Fault Tolerance) consensus protocol, which is under development, is used

➕ SMFT involves random rechecking of candidate blocks by any of the validators of the workchain (the verifier) using a deterministic multisignature BLS. A block is considered delivered if the number of validators who confirmed receipt of the block exceeds 50%.

🔗 Follow the link (10 minute read)

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New article in Everscale Deep Tech 🗂

The fifth article describes the actor model, tells what is this model in Everscale and how it works.

➕ Actors are small, executable code units that receive messages and then, depending on the message’s logic, respond to them by making local decisions

➕ The actor model is a computing model with the actor as a central entity in concurrent computation

➕ Two of the key characteristics of actors are their simplicity and intuitiveness

➕ Through actors, failover execution and scalability become possible, and both pseudo-synchronous and asynchronous messaging are supported

➕ In Everscale, everything is a smart contract, which can also be called an actor. In practice, a smart contract is an entity with properties such as address, code, data, and balance

➕ To reach a consensus about the state, nodes that process transactions need to coordinate the state of the smart contract from time to time

➕ In Everscale, the collection of all shards which contains all accounts behaving by one set of rules is called a workchain

➕ The main Workchain is used for everyday transactions between actors. When there are a lot of user messages the workchain may be split into shards

➕ Everscale’s architecture allows for creating up to 232 workchains, each subdivided into up to 256 shards or threads to be able to process a high number of transactions in times of heightened activity

🔗 Follow the link (6 minutes read)

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New article in Everscale Deep Tech 🗂

The sixth article talks about a rent mechanism for smart contracts that solves the problem of limited computing resources.

➕ Smart contracts consume resources, and Everscale solves the limitation problem by supporting only active contracts, providing efficient contract management and blockchain state storage

➕ Eternal storage is impractical because it causes blockchain state and transaction fees to grow. Ethereum offers deletion of inactive contracts, but this can break backward compatibility. Other blockchains delete contracts with low token balance

➕ In Everscale, smart contracts pay rent with EVER tokens. The fee depends on the amount of data. When the balance runs out, the contract is deleted, but can be restored. This approach gives control over lifespan, improves bandwidth, and eliminates competition for data storage. Developers can fund operations through tokens or fees from users

➕ Everscale storage fees are based on global bit and cell storage prices and the number of bits and cells in the contract. The fee is calculated for a certain period, e.g. one day. If there is not enough money in the contract to pay, it is frozen and the remaining fee becomes debt

➕ Overall, Everscale's rent mechanism and storage fee calculation is a rational solution for managing smart contracts and ensuring efficient use of resources on the blockchain

🔗 Read the full article (7 minutes read)

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New article in Everscale Deep Tech 🗂

The seventh article talks about Everscale Network Monitoring.

Everscale is an ecosystem that has solved the blockchain trilemma. As the number of users and dApps continues to grow, network-wide security becomes crucial, leading to the development of a strong and distinct monitoring system.

Everscale's monitoring system is capable of overseeing a variety of network components and processes, providing fault tolerance and enabling 99.999% availability of all operations in the network. The system is decomposed into three layers: End-User, Validation and Infrastructure — with each layer providing detailed information necessary to monitor the activity taking place in the respective layer. Automated alerting, visualization capabilities, and real-time mapping of validators are some of the key features of Everscale's monitoring system.

Thanks to the monitoring system, the Everscale devs were able to identify and prohibit malicious smart contract activity that tried to bring the entire network to a halt.

In general, there are the following set of properties of the monitoring system:

✔️Effectiveness — it must solve a wide range of tasks
✔️Flexibility — it should be able to receive data from different components of the network via different channels
✔️Openness — it must constantly take inputs from the network, process them and release them as outputs

Currently, Everscale has managed to achieve a certain harmony in combining all three properties.

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Everscale Deep Tech continues 🗂

Therefore, we invite you to read the "Account abstraction" article highlights.

There are 2 types of user accounts:

1. Externally Owned Account (EOA) — they use seed phrases for security, which can be compromised if someone unauthorized gets access to them.

2. Account Abstraction (AA) — smart contracts are used to protect accounts and authorize transactions, which can include various security features:

🔷Multisig: transactions above a certain threshold require the signature of multiple trusted parties, which provides an additional level of authorization

🔷Account freeze: the account can be locked from another device if the current device is lost or compromised, ensuring token protection even in case of unauthorized access to the device

🔷Account recovery: unlike EOA accounts, which can lead to a complete loss of token ownership if a private key or seed phrase is lost, the smart contract wallet allows account recovery by authorizing new devices

🔷Set thresholds: you can set limits on the number of tokens that can be transferred from an account within a certain period, which prevents a compromised account from being completely emptied in a single transaction

🔷Whitelists/blocklists: transactions can be restricted to certain addresses that are considered safe, which prevents unauthorized transfers. Conversely, transactions can be blocked from certain addresses involved in illegal activity

AA is not just about security. For example, a decentralized exchange would only need one atomic transaction to provide liquidity (instead of the usual three in the case of EOA). The reduction in multiple confirmations also applies to blockchain games, enabling actions to be performed literally in a single click.

Overall, AA provides increased security, convenience and flexibility of settings compared to EOA, making it the preferred choice for account and transaction management.

🔗 Read more in the article

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We continue our review of Everscale Deep Tech 🗂

Last week we looked in detail at the technology of «Account Abstraction» (AA), its features and principles of work. Today we propose to talk about a comparison of Account Abstraction approaches in Everscale and Ethereum networks. So:

🔵Ethereum has no built-in AA function and the blockchain relies on Externally Owned Accounts (EOA) with a number of restrictions and complex security measures

🔵In 2021, Ethereum introduced the EIP 4337 enhancement protocol to provide AA functionality via an entry point contract

🔵EIP 4337 is a separate transaction system that runs in parallel with the existing Ethereum protocol. The protocol includes many parameters, including UserOperation, Sender, Bundler, Entry Point, handleOps, validateOps and executeOps. The complex structure and mechanics of EIP 4337 make it difficult for users to understand and implement

🔵Everscale, by contrast, initially has built-in AA functionality in its core protocol, allowing users to interact via smart contracts and external messages

🔵AA in Everscale provides flexibility and allows for a variety of use cases, such as:

➖ Setting token transfer limits
➖ Controlling the use of funds with multi-signature
➖ Restoring account access with new device authorization

🔵Overall, the built-in account abstraction in Everscale simplifies the user experience by providing a simpler and more flexible usage approach compared to EIP 4337 in Ethereum

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How should a scalable blockchain actually work? 🗂

Today, as part of the Everscale Deep Tech column as an example, we propose to speculate on the question «How should a scalable blockchain really work?»

🔵Scalability in blockchain means the ability to handle growing workloads and process more transactions per second (TPS)

🔵Ethereum constantly faces scalability issues due to growing network activity, which in turn leads to higher transaction costs

🔵Everscale is a scalable fifth-generation blockchain with a unique architecture based on smart contracts

🔵Everscale uses a unique heterogeneous, horizontally scalable blockchain architecture. Here every object (even your wallet) is a smart contract

🔵Smart contracts exchange messages with each other, and the instructions in those messages are executed by the Threaded Virtual Machine (TVM). They can change their state as well as the state of other smart contracts

🔵Transactions are generated when smart contracts send messages and are stored in blocks on the Masterchain

🔵To achieve scalability, Everscale uses partitioning into shards that handle messages from multiple smart contracts. Depending on the current needs of the network, the shards can be split or merged

🔵The Masterchain handles random user transactions and can use multiple shards to handle load spikes. It plays a crucial role in reaching consensus on the state of the entire chain, as it contains block hashes of other shards

🔵The Everscale architecture supports up to 232 Workchains with 256 shards in each — this scalability allows millions of transactions per second without negatively impacting network fees

🔵Each Workchain can be independently configured and run its own virtual machine, commission policy and currency. Workchains can work in parallel and communicate with each other using an inter-chain communication mechanism

🔵This approach to flexibility and scalability makes Everscale blockchain a suitable platform for a variety of applications, such as payment or transportation systems, social networks or food delivery

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New Thursday is the new Everscale Deep Tech 🗂

The topic of today's post is scalability. As part of the column, we will compare approaches to solving scalability problems in Ethereum and Everscale networks. So:

🔵Blockchain technology offers five major advantages: decentralization, stability, transparency, traceability of network changes and freedom from censorship

🔵These fundamental characteristics of blockchain, in turn, rob the system of its ability to scale because decentralization, by definition, limits the number of transactions that blockchain can process to the scale of a single node in the network

🔵Ethereum faces three major technical challenges: scalability limitations, lack of wallets for smart contracts, and insufficient transaction privacy

🔵Ethereum's scalability limitations result in expensive transactions and slow transaction processing times during periods of high network activity

🔵Rollups, a technology for Layer 2 protocols where multiple transactions are combined into a single packet which is then validated in a Layer 1 blockchain, are seen by Vitalik Buterin as the only way to solve the scalability problem in Ethereum

🔵They can significantly increase throughput by moving computation and state storage off the network

🔵Everscale solves the scalability problem by data sharding and execution sharding

🔵Everscale can handle up to a million transactions per second at low cost, regardless of network congestion, using parallel execution of smart contracts

🔵Everscale allows you to create separate workchains to host different business applications (dApps), providing flexibility and fine-tuning capabilities

🔵Ethereum's improved scalability with rollups looks promising, but may not be enough for high-demand systems

🔵The Everscale approach already offers a workable solution for hosting highly loaded systems with instantaneous processing of large numbers of transactions at a low cost

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Account Abstraction: Everything you wanted to know 🗂

We continue our Deep Tech series, in which we have previously discussed the concept of Account Abstraction (AA) and compared its implementation in Ethereum and Everscale networks.

AA is a new paradigm allowing programming blockchain accounts which provides a Smart Account.

Smart Accounts can perform any programmed actions automatically without the need for human intervention.
 
EIP is the abbreviation for "Ethereum Improvement Proposal". Each proposal includes the methods according to which updates are made on the Ethereum blockchain.
 
The path towards EIP-4337

EIP-86 was the first attempt to provide AA functionality for Ethereum. In this model, all accounts became contracts with the ability to pay gas fees.
 
EIP-2938 provided for a limited version of AA. In this model, data represents all parameters that the AA contract must execute.
 
EIP-3074 proposal sought to allow users to hand over control of their accounts to a contract by signing a message with their account.

EIP-4337 is a complex structure which succeeds in simplifying the creation and management of Smart Accounts. Its implementation doesn't require any Ethereum consensus layer changes. Instead, this is realized by the division of the load across on-chain and off-chain infrastructure.
 
EIP-4337 drawbacks 

🟠Increased vulnerability to DDos attacks due to the complicated logic
🟠Increased gas costs
🟠One transaction at a time
🟠Backward compatibility: existing (old) accounts cannot be switched to Smart Accounts
 
AA in Everscale
 
Smart Accounts expand the possibilities of Multisignature and allows users to:

🔵Adapt security levels according to their needs
🔵Set a daily or any other limit on transfers
🔵Integrate off-chain services for additional protection
🔵Block transactions with unverified or sanctioned contracts
🔵Integrate AML services
 
🔗 Dive deeper in the article

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TVM as the basis of an asynchronous blockchain 📊

Another article in the DeepTech section dives deeper into the Everscale blockchain mechanics and the asynchronous nature that brings forth the unconstrained scalability. The comparison between synchronous Ethereum is going to highlight the issues to be solved by the asynchronous programming approach of a blockchain. The asynchronous nature of Everscale is based on a Threaded Virtual Machine (TVM) and Actor model architecture.

The Actor model is a parallel computing model. In Everscale, smart contracts are the main computing unit and act as actors in the model. They can send and receive messages, change their state, interact with other smart contracts, and deploy new smart contracts.

Unlike in EVM-based blockchains, where state is updated synchronously, the TVM allows for asynchronous updates of smart contract states. Each time a smart contract code is executed, a transaction is generated and validated by a blockchain node responsible for validating transactions from smart contracts within its thread.

Everscale aims to make it easier for developers to build applications that require efficient data retrieval and analysis from the blockchain. Unlike Ethereum, where indexing is performed with third-party projects, Everscale offers its own solutions for blockchain indexing. These solutions can save time and effort in developing custom indexing algorithms and allow developers to focus on building the core functionality of their applications.

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Fungible TIP-3 tokens in Everscale 🗂

As part of the «Everscale Deep Tech» column, today we offer a look at the implementation of fungible tokens on the Everscale blockchain using the TIP-3 token standard.

Let's highlight the main points:

🔵The adoption of EIP-20 in Ethereum enabled the creation of fungible tokens based on the ERC-20 standard, used for various purposes such as voting, value transfer and stablecoins

🔵ERC-20 smart contracts on Ethereum face challenges with data storage and scaling due to the need to store information about every token holder

🔵Everscale blockchain and Venom blockchain use the Threaded Virtual Machine (TVM) and sharding to achieve infinite scalability for token operations

🔵The TIP-3 token standard on Everscale implements a distributed token architecture with two types of smart contracts: TokenRoot and TokenWallet

🔵TokenRoot is the main contract of a TIP-3 token and stores information about the token, its owner, and total circulating supply. It can mint, burn, enable, and disable token operations

🔵TokenRoot supports easy upgrading of its logic through specific methods called by the contract owner

🔵The deployWallet() method of TokenRoot allows users to create new TokenWallet contracts to hold and transfer TIP-3 tokens

🔵TokenWallet contracts operate independently from TokenRoot and can transfer tokens to each other without the need to interact with TokenRoot directly

🔵Having a separate TokenWallet contract for each user allows for token transfers across different threads, contributing to infinite scalability

🔵TokenRoot does not need to store a token holders hashmap since each TokenWallet contract manages its own balance, addressing the issue of unbounded hashmaps

🔵Each smart contract in Everscale pays storage fees, and inactive smart contracts get frozen and eventually erased to manage blockchain congestion and storage costs

🔵TIP-3 token standard represents a new approach to token architecture, addressing challenges of older blockchains and leveraging the capabilities of the Threaded Virtual Machine

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CBDC Features on the Everscale Blockchain 🪙

➕In the series of 3 articles in the Deep Tech section, It’s proposed to discuss the potential of Everscale as a platform for hosting the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) of any country. The first article highlights the importance of security, scalability, and flexibility in a CBDC platform, and explores two technological solutions in the Everscale blockchain that address these aspects efficiently.

➕It highlights the advantages of CBDCs, such as cheaper and faster payments, the use of CBDCs in remote areas with limited access to financial systems, both online and offline transaction availability, possibility to be programmed by commercial banks, allowing for more efficient government payments, support for the unbanked population, and fighting corruption (for instance, an account of a municipality can be programmed to be able to spend funds only for certain predetermined purposes).

➕There are two unique technical solutions embedded in the Everscale blockchain core protocol that make it suitable for hosting CBDCs — even for counties with populations over 100 million people. These are Horizontal Scalability and Programmable Accounts. The Everscale blockchain has Account Abstraction (AA) functionality embedded into its core protocol. It means that each wallet (CBDC account) of a user (citizen) is a smart contract and therefore can be programmed to perform any logic individually for every person as well as for the groups of people. Overall, the article showcases the potential of CBDC accounts on the Everscale blockchain and how they can provide innovative solutions for various financial needs.

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Blockchain Data Privacy ❗️

Continuing the series of articles about the Ethereum and Everscale architectures, a new publication on the blockchain data privacy has been published in the Deep Tech section.

Key points:

⏺Data privacy is crucial in blockchain technology, especially in industries like healthcare. Compliance with data privacy regulations is essential for the continued advancement and adoption of blockchain in various sectors.

⏺Ethereum and Everscale are working on solutions for data privacy. Ethereum is developing stealth addresses, while Everscale is considering zkSNARKs for data privacy.

⏺The use of ZK-SNARKs in Everscale blockchain allows for efficient and secure handling of large-scale transactions while ensuring privacy and confidentiality. With the embedding of zkSNARKs into the protocol, Everscale shows promise in enabling private data transfers in a blockchain network.

🔗 Go to the article and dive into the topic

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