Synereo’s Technology Stack: Rchain, SpecialK, and Rholang

Israeli startup Synereo announced a blockchain based on a technology stack - RChain ,将区块链不在依赖集中式服务器，从而实现分布式的在线计算和存储。

Two weeks after the company announced that its decentralized social media platform had entered alpha, Synereo unveiled the underlying technology stack that enables its social network to function without centralized servers — which are typically required to process network activity and store user information.

This newly announced technology is a unique development by Synereo, combined with significant improvements over existing centralized technologies - providing industrial-grade scalable decentralized computing power for the first time. From Q4 2017, it will be possible to deploy fully operational applications on the system without having to be stored in a centralized location, effectively changing the way the Internet works.

Synereo's latest round of funding is aimed at funding developers to optimize its technology stack and promote the development of best-in-class development tools in various fields. Synereo's existing technology already allows everyone to create fully distributed applications. Currently, Synereo's social network is already in use by other partners, and with the version planned to be released next year, Synereo's architecture will become mature enough to match the requirements of high-end industries and will be more competitive than centralized computing platforms.

Synereo recently announced a massive grant program that will invite developers and entrepreneurs to build distributed applications for its platform in order to promote the development of a decentralized ecosystem and compete with the current centralized model.

The next version of the Synereo technology stack will be released in Q4 2017. It will consist of 4 layers, stacked on top of each other as shown in the following diagram.

1. Blockchain 2.0, or RChain

The first layer is called RChain, which is generally considered to be "Blockchain 2.0". It constitutes a significant improvement on the underlying technology of standard blockchain projects such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

A blockchain is a distributed ledger, or decentralized database, that records the state of a system through a series of devices that maintain a network (called nodes), rather than through a centralized server. Bitcoin pioneers invented the technology to monitor bitcoin transactions. The Ethereum project has taken it a step further, equipping it with the ability to complete complex transactions, essentially using it as a decentralized computer.

However, in contrast to those projects, Synereo’s RChain is a concurrent and distributed blockchain. “Distributed” refers to the fact that the blockchain is broken down into components that connect to form a unified whole, without having to compute everything at once (as is the case with the Bitcoin blockchain). “Concurrent” means that the branch enables different processes to run in parallel without interfering with each other.

Because of this structure, RChain is solving a well-known classic blockchain problem that has plagued the industry for years, while also making blockchain systems faster, infinitely scalable, and cheaper to maintain.

2. Storage and Content Delivery or SpecialK—

Since blockchain needs to record the overall state of the system, which means the execution of smart contracts and the validity of transactions, it is not suitable for storing rich media data such as images, videos and text. To this end, Synereo's CTO, Greg Meredith, has created a unique method to distribute this information among Synereo nodes and retrieve it on demand.

This protocol, SpecialK, has been in active development for over five years and constitutes an innovative approach to distributed storage technology. It represents an evolution of distributed key-value databases like DHT. SpecialK also provides a single domain-specific language and provides programmers with a familiar, unified API through which they can access data distributed across the network. Data is always distributed with redundancy and sensitivity in mind, ensuring that it is available whenever and wherever it is needed, and hidden when it is not needed.

3. Rholang smart contract language or Synereo’s programming language for distributed applications

Rholang stands for Reflective, High-level Procedural Language and is RChain's native smart contract language (or programming language), comparable to Ethereum's Solidity. However, in contrast to Solidity, Rholang is a reflective programming language based on process calculus, allowing for parallel execution of processes and composition of higher-level smart contracts on top of lower-level smart contracts in an efficient and secure manner.

This gives Rholang a clear advantage over traditional smart contract languages ​​and blockchain scripts, and puts it in the league of great programming languages. Java, C#, and Scala, have all finally adopted reflection as a core feature. It allows programmers to use programs to write other programs, and to deploy more complex applications. Without this feature, industrial-scale development would be impossible due to complexity.

The architecture also allows for better security testing and simulation on top of normal validation, which is an extremely important property when it comes to publicly used distributed applications. For example, the infamous The DAO could have been avoided if its code was based on Rholang.

For more information on Synereo’s fully decentralized technology stack, check out this architecture document or visit our website.

4. About Synereo:

Synereo, a Tel-Aviv-based company, has developed a distributed technology stack that allows web applications to exist without relying on centralized servers.

Founder:

Dor Konforty (CEO) is an Israeli Air Force graduate student with a Master's degree in Neurobiology. His work on neural networks inspired him to develop a new type of distributed economy.

Greg Meredith (CTO) was the principal architect of Microsoft's BizTalk business process collaboration, sparking several industry standards, including WSDL. Greg holds several patents and has published many papers, including the seminal paper on reflective higher-order calculus.