ALZA creates the public chain 4.0 standard: millions of tps, millisecond latency, 0 handling fees, but still maintains decentralization

What is public chain 4.0? Before answering this question, let’s take a look at the three generations of public chain technology in the history of blockchain:

Public chain 1.0, representing BTC, is highly decentralized and has very low scalability (4tps);

Public chain 2.0, represented by ETH, introduces smart contracts and has a slightly higher scalability than BTC (10tps);

Public chain 3.0, represented by EOS, has good scalability (10k tps) but sacrifices a lot of decentralization properties.

It seems that among the three basic elements of scalability, security and decentralization, the existing public chain standards cannot achieve a perfect balance. BTC and ETH are not only weak in scalability, but their practical security is also greatly reduced because transaction data is publicly disseminated to the entire network; EOS has solved most of the scalability and security problems, but has lost most of the core advantages of blockchain technology - decentralization.

ALZA, created by an ambitious and powerful Silicon Valley team, is expected to completely solve many of the defects of existing public chains and achieve a perfect balance of the three basic elements. ALZA can be considered the fourth major iteration of the public chain standard and a key milestone in the integration of blockchain technology and real business models.

Next, let’s explore in detail how ALZA solves the above key issues and challenges.

Scalability

The real world is crowded and busy, and business activities are even more so. During China's Double Eleven Shopping Festival, Alibaba's peak transaction throughput reached 200,000 tps; VISA credit card alliance's daily throughput is also 50,000 tps. In order to meet the transaction needs of daily business activities around the world, the blockchain platform needs to achieve a throughput capacity of millions of tps.

As representatives of the first and second generation public chains, BTC and ETH have actual transaction speeds of only 4tps and 10tps, and the delay can be up to several days. The handling fee is high and they are basically unsuitable for real business models. The reason is that they use the POW consensus mechanism, all transaction information needs to be confirmed by all chain users, and all transaction history is stored in the storage space of each user, which greatly hinders the scalability of the public chain.

In order to change this situation, the third-generation public chain EOS and the public chain 4.0 ALZA have abandoned the POW mechanism and used DPOS delegated equity proof to reduce the responsibility load of the main chain. ALZA sets up 23 super nodes (EOS has 21), which take turns to generate blocks at intervals of 3 seconds. The main chain's computing resource inspection and allocation tasks are all decided by voting of these super nodes, so that most participants are free from unnecessary logic checks.

Under the DPOS mechanism, the computing resources of the public chain mining pool are no longer wasted in meaningless decryption calculations, but are used to provide computing power for various Dapp applications, solving the most troubling resource optimization problem of early blockchain technologies such as BTC and ETH.

Off-chain transactions

With the super node mechanism, ALZA and EOS can increase the transaction speed to thousands of tps. In order to further increase the order of magnitude of tps, ALZA further introduced key innovations in off-chain transactions.

The so-called off-chain transaction means that most of the transaction links and data are not uploaded to the main chain, but only transmitted between off-chain counterparties. ALZA's off-chain transaction space is called a payment field. For example, when Alice needs to initiate a transaction with Bob, they will temporarily initiate an off-chain payment field. In ALZA, this payment field is called a self-organizing payment field, which has the ability to self-optimize and adapt.

Each off-chain payment field is automatically assigned a suitable number of ordinary users (defined as satellite nodes in ALZA) by ALZA's adaptive algorithm to act as witnesses. A payment field can include any number of transaction participants and can initiate countless transactions during its existence. Because there is no need to involve a large number of witnesses and corresponding data transmission, the transaction delay can be as low as milliseconds, and the cost is almost negligible.

When all transactions of a payment field are completed, it can be closed. After closing, the final ledger status of all parties in the transaction will be hashed and encrypted and wait to be uploaded to the main chain. When conditions are appropriate, the final data of multiple payment fields can also be packaged and transmitted to the main chain, further saving main chain resources.

In this way, most transactions can be initiated and completed without waiting for the main chain, and transaction details will not be fully spread to the entire chain; a large number of payment fields can be initiated at the same time, making full use of parallel processing resources, greatly improving the network's scalability. ALZA is expected to achieve a throughput level of millions of tps and millisecond latency, which is sufficient to meet the needs of daily economic activities around the world.

In addition, if traders need to, they can pay additional fees to upload the transaction content to the main chain for verification to achieve the highest transaction security. However, in this mode, all nodes of the main chain are not required to implement verification, but the number of verification nodes is automatically allocated according to the transaction fees paid. In this way, a market mechanism for transaction verification is formed. The more important the transaction (the higher the fee paid), the more verification resources are obtained, so that the entire system can maintain efficient operation.

RaFi (Redundant Array of Satellites)

RaFi is ALZA’s most important technological innovation mechanism. Based on this mechanism, ALZA achieves decentralization under ultra-high throughput while fully ensuring the availability and robustness of the entire network.

In the ALZA network, a large number of ordinary users are classified into numerous clusters, each of which has tens of thousands of satellite nodes. Each cluster has a named node selected by the system based on comprehensive parameters, which is responsible for coordinating data access tasks within the cluster.

When Alice needs to trade with Bob, or conduct other similar interactions through Dapp (transactions can be in the form defined by various Dapps in the ALZA ecosystem, such as sending messages, sending game props, giving gifts to anchors, etc.), Alice will send the access requirements of the relevant transaction data to the named node of this cluster. The latter selects three satellite nodes nearby to act as data access servers based on data such as network latency, and stores data redundantly in the storage of these nodes. When data needs to be called, the process is reversed. After receiving the request, the named node will call the data stored in the satellite nodes in sequence according to the previous storage records.

Because each piece of data only needs to be stored in three relatively random nodes, it means that the data storage capacity of the entire ALZA network is extremely large. Based on the total storage space of 128M bytes per satellite node, 10 million users can provide up to 400T of transaction data storage space, and have triple redundant backup capabilities, which is enough to meet the data needs of most network platforms. In the future, with the advancement of technology, the storage space reserved by each satellite node can be further expanded to 1G or even more, so that the data carrying capacity of the entire network will continue to improve.

At the same time, all satellite nodes will save the historical change records of data; and each cluster will also have additional snapshots and backup nodes to store the historical information of the transaction status of the entire cluster for backup. When the named node crashes or a similar disaster occurs, the snapshot and backup nodes can restore the state of the cluster to the previous normal time. This mechanism is sufficient to cope with most data disaster shocks, making ALZA very robust.

Since transaction data and application data used by Dapps are stored in decentralized random satellite nodes, each satellite node actually contributes equally to the main chain. The main chain only bears the verification responsibility of a few transactions and maintains the basic consensus of the entire network. It cannot access the detailed data and privacy content of each transaction, which also significantly weakens the power of super nodes. These mechanisms combined have restored ALZA's highly decentralized attributes abandoned by EOS, while also gaining stronger robustness and security, achieving a perfect balance of the three core elements of blockchain in one fell swoop.

ALZA team: dual advantages of theory and practice

Compared with other blockchain projects, ALZA's team has outstanding professionalism and academic spirit: the core of the team, Eric Li, came from Google's top big data research and development project, is the winner of the ASONAM Best Paper Award, and has the same doctoral advisor as Robin Li. He has rich development experience and academic attainments in data analysis, mining, core architecture and other fields; Nate Zou is the payment product manager at Intuit Quickbooks, the largest SME payment platform in the United States, and has a deep understanding of the technical foundation, architecture design, and risk control of payment products; other members of the team also come from core technology projects of top companies such as Google, and are full of enthusiasm and confidence in blockchain technology.

ALZA, which has a first-class team, has made a stunning debut: after the completion of ALZA's white paper, it was immediately recognized by the professional review of Cornell University and publicly published in the form of an extremely rare underlying technology paper in the blockchain field. So far, only a few first-class public chains such as BTC and ETH have won this honor. The team believes that traditional centralized payment technology is very mature and robust. In comparison, existing blockchain projects are fragile and immature and cannot subvert traditional business models. ALZA has made unprecedented major breakthroughs, achieving bank-level performance, security and robustness, which is enough to become an upgrade and replacement for the traditional centralized business system.

Summarize

ALZA's design is very clever and outstanding: it not only greatly improves transaction scalability by using super nodes and off-chain payments, but also ensures decentralization through innovative RaFi, and brings the security and robustness of the network to a new level.

After perfectly achieving the balance of the three basic elements, ALZA has great potential to subvert the traditional business model in the real world. Small and medium-sized retail enterprises, e-commerce platforms, online games, video live broadcast services, the Internet of Things... Many industries can use ALZA to create a transaction and interaction system with extremely low cost, extremely fast speed, and sufficient security, and use blockchain technology to decentralize and upgrade the industry. It can be seen that ALZA is qualified enough to become the representative and leading platform of the blockchain 4.0 era.

Historically, blockchain products that have achieved key technological innovations have brought huge returns to early investors, and the birth of ALZA has once again created such an opportunity for investors. This year, many public chains will be launched and fiercely compete, but only ALZA's prospects are worthy of everyone's attention and expectations.

As soon as the project was launched, it attracted the attention and invitation of American investment institutions and rating agencies.

—The Telegram group also attracted 55,000 overseas fans in two months, who actively asked questions about technical principles and technological innovations.

—Twitter also attracted 9,000 followers. Overseas media rushed to report on it and gave it high praise.

—Github Watch 40/Star 141/Fork 49

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ALZA_Official

Telegram: https://t.me/ALZA_Official

Whitepaper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.11510

Website: www.alza.io

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