Four years after the fat agreement concept, the academic public chain emerged

The blockchain has a history of ten years since the birth of Bitcoin, while the underlying cryptography of the blockchain has a history of thousands of years.

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Classical cryptography, which dates back thousands of years, USES pen and paper, or simple mechanical AIDS, to encrypt. By the early 20th century, with the invention of some complex machinery and electric machinery, more complex and effective encryption methods were born, such as the rotary encryption represented by the Enigma cipher machine. Subsequent electronic components and computers made it even more complex and sophisticated, and most of the encryption methods that emerged were now completely free of pen and paper.

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The development of cryptography was accompanied by the development of cryptanalysis, by the deciphering of codes and encryption methods. Frequency analysis of encrypted communications. Before the 1970s, cryptography was largely a government security area. But two things happened that brought cryptography into the public domain: the birth of open standard encryption systems (data-encryption standards), and the invention of public-key encryption.

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Claude Shannon is credited with opening the door to modern cryptography with his academic article "Mathematical Theory of cryptography" published in 1945. Compared with classical cryptography, modern cryptography not only focuses on information confidentiality, but also involves information integrity verification (message verification code), non-repudiation of information release (digital signature), and all information security issues arising from internal and external attacks in distributed computing.

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In short, modern cryptography is the cornerstone of Internet security and the blockchain industry.

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The rise of the academic public chain

Modern cryptography is the cornerstone of the blockchain industry, and the development of modern cryptography is mostly driven by top universities. The top universities won't miss the party. Stanford invited Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase's chief technology officer, to teach asa lecturer. The Yale endowment has invested directly and fully in Paradigm, a crypto asset fund of $400 million, and in A16Z's crypto focus & NBSP; A16z crypto. The Harvard Endowment is even directly involved in the STO (token issuance of securities).

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Top universities not only conduct theoretical research on block chain, but also participate in market investment, but rarely conduct research and development on public chain. Until recently, a part of professors and scholars in the industry with university background and research in the field of cryptography began to carry out the research and promotion of public chain, which was called "academic public chain". Among them, DeFi infrastructure Sperax, the item Named Avalanche protocol and Oasis, the privacy computing platform, are the main representatives of the "Academic public chain".

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In August 2016, Joel Monegro from several top venture capital parent funds including Multicoin, Polychain and Placeholder (UNION Square Venture) published an article called "Fat Agreement". The article has sparked heated discussions within and outside the industry, which extends to the fact that the value of the blockchain industry lies more at the protocol level than at the application level.

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Fat Agreement (2016)

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Influenced by the "fat protocol", Sperax invited Professor Wang Yongge (THE United States), the world's top cryptography expert and the inventor of BDLS consensus, to serve as the technical consultant to guide the team to build consensus protocol layer in BDLS theory. At the same time, Ryan Zurrer, a former partner of Polychain who discovered star projects such as Polkdot, will also join the governance committee.

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Professor Wang Yongge once studied in Heidelberg University in Germany and obtained his doctor's degree in mathematics. RLCE, his proposed post-quantum encryption algorithm, has been selected into the candidate list of post-quantum standards by NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In addition, Wang also participated in the formulation of IETF, W3C XML protocol, IEEE 1363 protocol and SAN Internet security protocol. Under The guidance of Professor Wang, Sperax has reached new levels in true random proof (PoTR), anti-quantum attacks and privacy protection. As a result, Sperax raised a $6 million seed round in 2019 from Outlier Ventures, FBG and others, Europe's largest blockchain funds.

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Emin Gun Sirer, a computer science professor at Cornell University, is a well-known opinion leader in the cryptographic industry. In 2002, he published the Karma, the world's first e-currency system to adopt PoW. Gun is a director of the Blockchain Alliance IC3. He co-founded the Avalanche Protocol with his student, Ted Yin. Yin Maofan serves as the chief agreement architect and co-founder of Avalanche Agreement.

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Even more impressive than academic success was the avalanche deal, which raised $42 million in just 4.5 hours. Of course, prior to the ipo, Avalanche Initialized Capital had secured $18 million in funding from institutions including A16Z, Initialized Capital, Polychain Capital, Galaxy Digital, BitLand, Initialized Capital and others.

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The representative of UC Berkeley is Professor Xiaodong Song. Song Xiaodong, MacArthur Fellow winner of MacArthur Genius Award, instructed students to complete the paper "Stain Analysis Dynamic Taint Analysis", which is the paper with the highest number of references in the field of computer security and led the development of commercial trend in the field of computer security. Meanwhile, Song Xiaodong was also one of the initiators of IC3.

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Although Professors Wang Yongge, Emin Gun Sirer and Song Xiaodong are all regarded as representatives of academic public chains, their research directions are slightly different. Both Sperax and Avalanche protocols attempt to move beyond Consensus 2.0 to become benchmarks for Consensus 3.0.

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Sperax and avalanche protocol consensus 3.0

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"Sperax and avalanche take a similar but different path in terms of avalanche protocol becoming consensus 3.0," Yin Maofan, chief protocol architect of the avalanche protocol, said during a live broadcast.

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The essence of consensus 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 is to achieve consensus in three fundamentally different ways. Consensus 1.0 is known as PoW, and it has obvious advantages and disadvantages: decentralized, more secure but less efficient network, over-centralized computing power; Consensus 2.0 usually refers to the practical Byzantine fault tolerant Consensus (PBFT).

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The Byzantine general problem is the impossibility of trying to achieve consistency through messaging over unreliable channels. In order to solve this problem, Miguel Castro and Barbara Liskov proposed PBFT in 1999 and solved the problem of low efficiency of the original Byzantine fault tolerance algorithm. PBFT has obvious advantages: small network size, fast network processing speed, permanent security rather than probabilistic security, and abundant scientific research data.

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Flow of PBFT algorithm

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However, the practical Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus also has obvious disadvantages, such as high communication complexity (N ^2), low scalability and difficulty in capacity expansion, high latency of network instability, and serious degradation of network performance with network size expansion (node increase).

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The number of PBFT communications after node increase

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For this reason, Yin Maofan launched the "HotStuff" algorithm to solve the network performance problem.

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In a Libra white paper and related technical documentation, Facebook says Libra USES the LibraBFT consensus algorithm, which is a variation on HotStuff.

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HotStuff process

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In Yin's opinion, HotStuff is only an upgraded version of Consensus 2.0, but not consensus 3.0. The real consensus 3.0 is the avalanche Agreement. The avalanche protocol is inspired by the Epidemic Model and combines the characteristics of the non-Byzantine consensus algorithm and the Nakamoto Consensus algorithm.

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Sperax team launched the self-developed consensus 3.0 "BDLS" based on the DLS protocol developed by C.Work, N.Lynch and L.Tockmeyer. BDLS has greatly improved network security and communication efficiency. Most importantly, BDLS solves the security problem that block chain protocols under part of asynchronous network may become locked for the first time, and it is the Byzantine fault tolerance protocol of block chain with the best performance (security + efficiency) at present.

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Evolution history of PBFT

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BDLS has reached a consensus by reducing round complexity and communication complexity:

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Comparison of communication complexity between BDLS and PBFT-based protocol (Note: the lower the communication complexity, the better)

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Meanwhile, the paper Sperax: An Approach To Defeat Long Range Attacks In Blockchains, which contains THE design concept and ideas of BDLS, was accepted by IEEE INFOCOM EdgeBlock Branch, a top international academic conference In computer science field. Sperax researcher Yu Zhou was also invited To participate In IEEE INFOCOM 2020 To give a theme report.

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Researchers in the encryption industry say Sperax's BDLS and avalanche protocols are both somewhat close to consensus 3.0, and the rest will take time to verify.

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Wrong about the fat deal?

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In the face of the current DeFi craze, many investors begin to question whether the "fat agreement" is wrong, and the academic public chain is doing useless work, the agreement and technology are only auxiliary.

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Fat Protocol is right. Cryptography is the cornerstone of the blockchain industry, and the protocol layer and infrastructure are still the biggest areas of blockchain value. DeFi project Compound, Balancer, Synthetix, and Anchor are all interesting attempts, but it's clear that the Ethereum network still won't be able to accommodate these interesting applications. Perhaps a DeFi application can be seamlessly plugged into Sperax's network because Sperax can achieve high performance while being secure and compatible with Ethereum virtual machines.

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Sperax star researcher Joe Yu told Rhythmic BlockBeats that mankind's invention of science and technology is ultimately for the service of mankind, so we should not only pay attention to the underlying technology, but also pay attention to its application and landing. However, we need to realize that if we only focus on application and landing, while ignoring the protocol layer and infrastructure to realize application landing, then the blockchain will become a castle in the air. Therefore, while focusing on infrastructure, it is also necessary to popularize technology to users in the simplest terms.

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