Standing on the shoulders of giants — Synereo’s Blockchain 2.0

The nature of the Bitcoin blockchain, as described in Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 white paper, was a once-in-a-decade breakthrough in computer science. The distributed ledger described by Nakamoto made it possible for independent individuals to verify economic transactions without the involvement of a third party such as a clearing house, a technical achievement that many experts today consider impossible.

The industry leaders and stalwarts quickly picked up the basic concept of maintaining an open database through consensus and expanded it to something incredible: using Satoshi’s principles, they transformed the Internet into a public, open-source world computer, made up of thousands of interconnected personal devices, accessible and usable by everyone. Such a world computer would make the Internet truly untouchable and censorship-resistant, and it would level the playing field for ordinary people to compete with the centralized behemoths of the current tech industry.

When Synereo was founded, these concepts were in their infancy (albeit an impressive infancy), and Ethereum was just taking off, looking promising as the infrastructure for Synereo’s social network.

However, as time went by, Synereo became more and more aware that it should go beyond the existing solutions in the industry. The blockchains of the same period were slow, uneconomical, and difficult to scale, and they were not enough to support a social network that could compete with Facebook and Twitter.

Synereo was faced with this reality, so we decided to develop our own infrastructure to meet the needs of our social layer, and so we did. The result is the long-awaited first prototype of the World Computer. We created a virtual computer that can run distributed applications, whether designed for high-volume, high-speed applications or for data storage, without the need for server clusters or a central control center. The users of this network provide all the resources and run the network.

Introduction to R-chain: The first Turing-complete blockchain with unlimited scalability

All standard blockchains share a fundamental flaw: to ensure reliability and consistency, each device in the network must maintain a backup of the entire blockchain history. Take the Bitcoin blockchain as an example. It records every Bitcoin transaction. Currently, the volume of this data is 80G. There are tens of thousands of miners in the network, and each miner has to maintain a copy of this data. This system is not only wasteful and unsustainable, but it is also impossible to implement more complex applications on this system.

The same is true for Turing-complete Ethereum and Lisk. Every node (device running on the network) must process every activity on the system. Can you imagine downloading and verifying the entire Internet every time you check your email? Isn't that unrealistic?

To solve this problem, Synereo developed the world’s first parallel, fragmented blockchain, called Rchain. “Fragmentation” means splitting the blockchain into recombinable modules, without having to complete all its calculations at once. “Parallel” means that different processing processes can be carried out simultaneously without interfering with each other.

The advantage of this architecture is that it does not require every node in the network to verify and save the entire blockchain, which means that the creation of blockchains can be faster because their processing is parallel and it is not necessary for all devices to save the data of the entire network at all times. Each node can only save one fragment according to its own needs. This division of labor allows different nodes to focus on solving different problems at the same time.

Such a system is scalable because as it grows, it will provide more resources instead of overloading them. At the same time, it also protects precious resources such as storage, energy, and computing power instead of wasting them in redundant backups or generating a lot of heat in the case of severe greenhouse effect.

Proof of Stake

Each blockchain has a consensus protocol to ensure that it will not collapse or be hacked. Each node will check its own results to ensure that each entry is consistent with other nodes, and only then will the results be recorded on the blockchain. There are many types of consensus protocols. The classic Bitcoin uses Proof of Work (PoW), which allows each node to perform complex mathematical operations to ensure security, because attacking such a network requires huge costs.

This is extremely wasteful in terms of both energy consumption and time. Essentially, thousands of devices are performing meaningless calculations for the sole purpose of driving up the cost of attacking the network. Maybe this approach is sufficient for Bitcoin, but for a world computer, all available resources must be utilized, so it cannot waste its computing power on meaningless complex calculations.

Rchain’s consensus protocol is based on Ethereum’s Casper protocol, a variant of proof-of-stake that is cheap for everyone to use but expensive for those who want to launch an attack.

Each node that wants to participate in the verification process must pay a deposit (as collateral) to the central pool. If a node participating in the consensus process has any "invalid" activities that arouse Casper's suspicion, its deposit will be confiscated. Using a deposit can solve the "nothing at stake" problem, that is, if there is no stake, it is easy to have bad behavior. Casper makes behavior have stakes, and if a node is objectively proven to have bad behavior, the node will suffer losses.

Unlike Ethereum's Casper, Rchain nodes do not verify the entire block, but rather verify logical topics, a topic consisting of a series of blockchain statements; for example: which transactions must be included, in which order; which transactions should not be included, and other content. This design and this concurrent process, as well as the concurrent processing of blockchain fragments, allow the Rchain consensus protocol to handle large-scale transactions simultaneously.

Special-K Protocol

While blockchain records the overall status of the system, that is, the validity of transactions and the execution of smart contracts, it is not suitable for storing large amounts of multimedia information, such as pictures, videos, text, etc. Therefore, Greg Meredith, CTO of Synereo, developed a unique protocol to store such data on Synereo nodes and retrieve it on demand.

The protocol, called Special-K, has been under intensive development for four years and is an innovative distributed storage technology. This technology is an evolution of the distributed key database of the DHT class (Distributed Hash Table), which is the basis for Synereo to create applications. Special-K also provides a domain-specific programming language (DSL) that provides programmers with a familiar, unified API to facilitate their access to data distributed in this network. At the same time, this data has a certain degree of redundancy and sensitivity, which ensures that it can be called where or when it is needed, and can be hidden when it is not needed.

Rholang——reflective, high-level processing language

Rholang is Rchain's native smart contract language (programming language), which is equivalent to Solidity in Ethereum. However, unlike Solidity, Rholang is a reflective programming language based on process calculus, which can handle processes in parallel and execute high-level smart contracts in a suitable and safe way.

These features give Rholang a distinct advantage over traditional smart contract languages ​​and blockchain scripting languages, making it a language like existing programming languages, such as Java, C#, and Scala, which all use reflective programming as a core feature. This feature allows programmers to use programs to write other programs, deploy more complex applications, and so on. Without this feature, the expansion of the industry scale will be impossible due to the high complexity.

This architecture allows for better security testing and simulation, which is an extremely important feature for decentralized applications used by the public. For example, the infamous The Dao hack would not have happened if the Dao code was written based on Rholang.

Summarize

Synereo’s passion for decentralized, fair, and censorship-free social networking has driven the development of a complete technology stack that can support more than just social networking. The release of the full Synereo platform will herald the advent of an internet of serverless applications that is censorship-resistant, where activity and information can flow freely, with the boundaries of freedom limited only by your imagination.

Imagine an internet where the content you create is fully monetized, and your data isn’t sold to marketers, corporations, and governments. Imagine a true P2P economy where individuals collaborate at scale, without being charged by platform giants. These are all possible, and they’re closer to reality than you think.