Stellar Foundation CTO Jed talks about the new network

Stellar is a fully decentralized payment network that allows anyone to send and exchange any currency. It can be thought of as a decentralized exchange for Bitcoin.

Why did I create the Stellar Network? After working in the fintech space for many years, I realized that the world's financial infrastructure was broken and billions of poor people were being left out. So, Joyce Kim and I started the Stellar Foundation with the intention of creating an open standard for fintech. Anyone can participate and it will be more useful to the 2 billion unbanked people around the world.

Since the Stellar Foundation began operations, we have announced several partnerships, given a speech at the United Nations, and released Stellar's new consensus algorithm and codebase. Together with other Stellar Core contributors, Professor David Mazieres, Graydon Hoare, and Nicolas Barry, I redesigned this new codebase. I am excited to share the motivations behind the design decisions and discuss the future of Stellar.

Upgrade to a simple and modular network

A key factor in the organic growth of the Internet is the simplicity of its underlying architecture. We have designed the new network with as little complexity as possible. Our system is robust and maintainable, while still being powerful and expressive.

The new network is more secure, more scalable, and more modular. We've broken down the network's functionality into components that are easier to understand, maintain, and extend. The size of the Stellar core code is more than half the size of the previous version. Data is now stored in a SQL database, making it easier for people to pull information out of the Stellar network and interact with it using standard tools and libraries. Graydon's presentation provides details on where and how data flows in the Stellar system.

Safety first

One of the main reasons we refactored the code was to implement the new Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), which consists of a unique, correct federated consensus algorithm. Distributed systems are complex, and reaching consensus in a distributed network is even more complex - this requires a well-understood and provable consensus algorithm like SCP to ensure that the network does not fork.

To ensure maximum safety, we simulate a large number of failure scenarios in unit and integration tests. We also use interfaces and models connected to Stellar Core and Kyle Kingsbury's Jepsen tool to verify network partition scenarios for distributed systems. In all of the above scenarios, the network is interrupted until the necessary node consensus model is re-established and resumes operation at the point of interruption. The network must be interrupted under these conditions. Or choose to fork. This means that the network splits into two parts and the network state is no longer consistent. Non-forking is a key feature of any distributed, decentralized consensus algorithm, and we spend a lot of effort and time here to ensure this.

Smart Contracts

In line with our design philosophy, we focus on designing simple components that users can combine to achieve their goals. Our approach to implementing smart contracts is to strip most of the logic out of the core system to ensure that Stellar Core can adapt to the scale of global applications.

Two key components of the Stellar network's smart contracts are multi-signature support and batch operations. Stellar accounts can now have multiple signatories with different weights, allowing you to implement simple m/n accounts or more complex permission schemes.

A transaction is now a collection of operations. For example, a transaction could be, if B sends to C, then A sends to B. This abstraction, combined with Stellar's built-in distributed exchange, allows for surprisingly rich content for contracts. Bonds, escrows, collateralized debt, and the Lightning Network are all possible on Stellar.

Community-driven network

Currently, the Stellar network is run entirely by the community outside of the Stellar Foundation. We want to ensure that the network is not operated and managed by the Stellar Foundation. In addition to the Stellar Foundation contributing open source core code, the community will make the network more colorful and valuable.

Imagine the future

We are developing tools and derivative protocols for the Stellar protocol. In the future, we will support more features such as messaging and private transactions.

I have a lot of interesting ideas in my head that could be implemented on the Stellar Network. I've jotted down some of my favorites: check them out here.

Honestly, I’d much rather see people’s own creative ideas, and there will definitely be a lot of them.

Jed McCaleb is the co-founder and CTO of the Stellar Foundation. In 2000, he developed eDonkey, one of the largest file-sharing networks at the time. He later founded Mt.GOX, the first Bitcoin exchange, which was later sold to its current owners and rewritten. Contact Jed on GitHub, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Original article: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/stellar-s-jed-mccaleb-what-s-new-on-the-upgraded-stellar-network-1452109082
Translator: Lao Chi
Editor: printemps
Source (translation): Babbitt Information