Synereo blockchain technology stack enables serverless and scalable network computing and storage

Following last month’s announcement that its decentralized social media platform had entered alpha, the Israeli startup immediately unveiled its underlying technology stack that will allow its social network to operate without the need for central servers — which are typically required to process network activity and store user information.

The company said that this new development has significant implications for the technology in the original development model and the existing decentralized model - providing scalable distributed computing capabilities for industrial scale for the first time!

From 2017, this technology stack will be fully operational on systems that no longer need to be stored in a centralized area, effectively revolutionizing the Internet based on the way developers work. Until then, the Alpha version of Synereo’s social network will be available on the company’s decentralized test network.

Recently, Synereo also announced a funding program to invite developers and entrepreneurs to develop and expand the platform for distributed applications, promote the development of decentralized systems, and compete with the current centralized model.

R Chain

Synereo’s technology stack consists of four layers, built on top of each other. The first layer, called R-Chain, also known as ‘Blockchain 2.0’, is said by its developers to be a significant improvement over traditional blockchain technology, while the underlying layers are similar to Bitcoin and Ethereum.

In contrast, Synereo’s R-chain is a concurrent and sharded blockchain. “Sharding” refers to the breakdown of a blockchain into components that interlock to form a unified whole, but do not all need to be computed at once (similar to the case of the Bitcoin blockchain). Concurrency means that this breakdown allows different processes to run simultaneously without interfering with each other.

Synereo boasts that the R-Chain architecture solves well-known problems that have plagued the entire traditional blockchain industry for years, while enabling blockchain systems to run more smoothly and maintain at a lower cost, thus achieving unlimited scalability.

SpecialK

Synereo says blockchain is not suitable for storing large file data such as images, videos and text. To this end, Synereo CTO Greg Lucius Meredith developed a unique protocol to distribute this information between Synereo nodes and then retrieve it as needed.

SpecialK has been actively developing this protocol for more than four years and represents the evolution of distributed hash tables (DHT) - such as distributed key databases. The company explained that SpecialK also provides a single domain-specific language that can provide programmers with a familiar, unified application interface (API) to access distributed data over the network. The complexity and sensitivity of data decentralization coexist, so it is necessary to ensure that it is available when needed and hidden when not needed.

Smart contract language rholang

Rholang (Reflection, High-level Process Language) is the native smart contract programming language of R Chain, which is comparable to the stability of Ethereum. However, unlike its stability, Rholang is a reflective programming language that allows higher-level smart contracts to be executed simultaneously with lower-level processes in an efficient and secure manner based on process calculus.

Developers say this feature gives Rholang a huge advantage over traditional smart contract languages ​​and blockchain scripting systems, and puts it on the map as a construction programming language. Java, C, and Scala systems eventually adopted reflection as a core feature. This allows programmers to use programs to write other more complex applications, and so on. Without this feature, industrial-scale development is likely to fail due to complexity.

One of the best features of the architecture is that it supports testing and simulation to improve security when it comes to public distributed applications. For example, Synereo said that if the infamous DAO hack had been based on Rholang's code, the tragedy might have been avoided.