Partnered With:

Nervos Jan: Interoperability 2.0 -- The road to a unified digital economy

Read this article in 23 Minutes

Jan, Nervos chief architect, Shared the theme of Interoperability 2.0: The Road to a Unified Digital Economy at his Digital Finance Forum

Original title: | Nervos Jan: interoperability 2.0 -- the road to a unified digital economy

Source: Nervos Chinese Community

On October 27, the sixth global Blockchain Summit hosted by Wanxiang Blockchain Lab opened grandly at W Hotel on the Bund of Shanghai. 1On the afternoon of 28th Of February, Jan, Nervos chief architect, Shared the theme of interoperability 2.0: The Road to a Unified Digital Economy at his Digital Finance Forum.

Jan said that the future blockchain world or digital finance world will be built on a multi-chain environment, so the blockchain world must solve the issue of interoperability.

Nervos's flexible underlying cryptographic primitives allow Nervos to provide a level 2.0 interoperability experience, allowing it to follow the standards of all existing chains, thus opening up to other existing portals and realizing the vision of merging them.Users can enter the blockchain world from any entry and manipulate any asset in the digital world, and none of these problems can be solved by inventing a new standard or entry.

In addition, Nervos dApp can be used by blockchain and even Internet users with zero threshold. Other chain assets can be freely transferred between multiple chains through Nervos. Other applications on the chain can migrate to Nervos on virtual machine compatibility layers such as EVM without changing any code.

The following is the full text of Jan's speech. Please check it out.

In the field of blockchain, there is a consensus that the future blockchain world or digital finance world will be built on a multi-chain environment, and there will be many chains in the future. So, the blockchain world is about interoperability, how chains and chains interact, how assets move from one chain to another, or, in a more common word, across chains.

Current interoperability issues

Interoperability is not a particularly big technical issue today, and various solutions are being studied more clearly. We have also seen the emergence of various cross-chain technologies, cross-chain projects in reality. But if not, then there is no problem. Is this enough? Today, we can also see two obvious problems:

First of all,It is still fragmented by standards.

Although we already have cross-chain technology, you can see that there are not only cross-chain projects like Boca, but also Cosmos, which have different standards, so how do these two chains interoperate? Perhaps some people say that over time, there must be a standard will slowly win out.

But over time, instead, there's a new situation, like bitcoin and Ethereum, where they're starting to be able to directly cross links with each other, and bitcoin can be directly transferred to Ethereum. So I think instead this is a world of many chains, not all of them are fused together, and the cross-chain between the chains doesn't go through a Hub, and the world is still fragmented. Interoperability 1.0 is technically possible from a chain point of view.

Second,The user experience is still fragmented.

From the user's point of view, if I'm a Bitcoin user and want to transfer my Bitcoin to Ethereum to participate in some applications, I need to first operate my Bitcoin wallet and then cross the chain. Next, installing an Ethereum wallet requires two apps, two addresses, and two sets of mnemonic words to remember. This in itself is a very fragmented thing:If you have a few chains, you have to have a few things, because it's a different system of accounts.

That's the big question today,How can you unify it?Is it a new project or a new standard? This has been proven by history not to work,The new standard will only add a new standard to the world, rather than unify the existing standards.

Interoperability 2.0

Interoperability 2.0 is about allowing users to enter the blockchain world from any point of entry and manipulate any asset in the digital world, rather than inventing a new standard.

Interoperability 2.0 is all about solving these problems, but in what way?

We're going to use a chain that follows the standards of all the existing chains, that can go through all the existing portals, and realize the vision of bringing everything together.Simply put, it is about looking at the problem from the user's point of view, enabling the user to enter the blockchain world from any point of entry and manipulate any asset in the digital world, rather than inventing a new standard.

To do that, it first needs to be compatible with existing standards and directly connected to existing blockchains. Secondly, can not create a new entry, can not do a new account system. It's about giving users access to your services and assets in the digital economy from any point of entry, from an entry they own now, from an account they own now.

How does Nervos achieve interoperability 2.0

This is a very difficult question, and it requires two basic properties at the bottom of the blockchain,One is flexible cryptography support and the other is flexible account systems.

Why do we need these two things? There should be an interoperability 2.0 layer on the chain with components such as PW Core and Polyjuice to build on top of the interoperability 2.0 layer. In this way, applications built on the interoperability 2.0 layer can be accessed by any blockchain user, be it ethereum, Bitcoin or EOS, so that your application can reach a wide audience, and all users can access everything in the blockchain world through this system.

What is needed in the interoperability 2.0 layer?

Force Bridge

The first is a common cross-chain protocol, which in Nervos Network we call Force Bridge. Generic is the cross-chain protocol that allows Nervos Network CKB to be connected to any other chain, such as BTC, ETH, EOS. Check out the code for Force Bridge:

https://github.com/nervosnetwork/toCKB

https://talk.nervos.org/t/tockb-an-asset-cross-chain-system/4945

What are the difficulties of doing a common cross-chain protocol?

This means that your underlying blockchain has to support flexible cryptography, because when you get through to different blockchains, you need to understand the cryptographic algorithms used by different blockchains. The essence of cross-chain is to write an intelligent contract on the local chain to understand the cryptographic evidence provided by the remote chain. BTC, for example, USES one signature algorithm and one hash algorithm, Ethereum is another, EOS is another, and you need to understand these cryptography from your own perspective, which is why you need the underlying support for flexible cryptography.

PW Core

Force Bridge enables the free flow of assets between Nervos Network and other chains. What PW Core does is implement the free flow of assets between Nervos Network and other chains.

This is a project developed by a community team to help your application be accessible to all blockchain applications, such as if you have an Ethereum wallet that can use the Ethereum address to operate your Nervos Network assets.You don't need to install a new wallet, set up a new account, or remember a new mnemonic to get into the world. The PW SDK lowers the threshold for users to zero.Welcome to see the relevant code:

https://github.com/lay2dev/pw-core

Polyjuice

Polyjuice allows developers to migrate freely between Nervos Network and other chains. Polyjuice is a common computing layer on top of Nervos Network. What we're doing right now is supporting Ethereum, which means that ethereum developers can migrate Ethereum applications to CKB without changing any code. Welcome to see the relevant code:

https://github.com/nervosnetwork/polyjuice

https://github.com/TheWaWaR/ens-polyjuice

Therefore, with these three tools, we can realize the flow of assets, user flow and application flow.

What can Interoperability 2.0 do

Everything adds up to interoperability 2.0, so what can you do with that?

In the case of Ethereum users, the users they normally interact with are Ethereum wallets. Some say it could be either a MetaMask or imToken user, wallets that interact with ethereum's ecology. There are a lot of apps and assets in the Ethereum ecosystem, but users interact with them through their wallets, not directly. And what's holding this ecology is the ethereum blockchain, which really has a chain running, and miners digging, or Layer 2's ecology or protocols.

If your application supports interoperability 2.0, your ecology can become part of ethereum's ecology. For ethereum users, they can use ethereum's existing account system to access applications with interoperability 2.0.

For Ethereum users, these apps are no different than any other Ethereum app. The user doesn't understand what's going on at the bottom of the wallet, just like today when we visit a website, it might be written in PHP, it might be written in JAVA, it might be written in a language that you don't know, but you don't care, you just care that the browser will help you get to the website that you want to go to. Interoperability 2.0 will make today's world a lot like today's Internet.

What's the good of that?

This means that apps that are interoperable 2.0 have an advantage over other blockchain apps, because to use other blockchain apps, you need a new wallet, a new account system, and a new thing to learn, something calledUser threshold.

The same thing happens in the Bitcoin world. For bitcoin users, who normally use bitcoin wallets, maybe they don't even know about Ethereum. These wallets deal with users of Bitcoin.

Ethereum is another world for users, and if they are going to use Ethereum's DeFi, there are also high user barriers, not to mention other blockchains. If you have interoperability 2.0, what you can do is you'll be part of the bitcoin ecosystem.

For Bitcoin, the interoperability 2.0 apps and existing Bitcoin apps are a whole bunch, because I just need to use my existing wallet and my existing account to access them without installing anything new or learning anything new. Whether it's bitcoin, EOS, Ethereum, Tron, it's the same. These are just two examples, and you can generalize to other chains, and it's the same for all chain users.

What's even better?We can see not only the users of the existing blockchain world, in fact, the blockchain is a relatively small world, we can go further.Because the blockchain account system is nothing more than an account system, it is nothing more than a kind of identity. But in the world of the Internet, there are many ready-made standards for identity, account systems and authentication. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum are reworking the standards for a new account system. For example, Bitcoin has its own signature algorithm, because it was the first project and left early, and subsequent projects all use this signature algorithm or change it.

Don't forget that one person left earlier, the Internet. There are a number of mature protocols on the Internet that are used by a large number of users. When you log on to a website, when you use face recognition, when you use fingerprint recognition, you are doing identity authentication, we can also touch these. Internet users will use browsers, mobile devices, and if it is an interoperability 2.0 application, they will also be able to access it without having to install any blockchain wallet or generate public and private keys for the blockchain, and memorize new mnemonics.

This is an ecosystem, and we can adapt to the existing Internet ecosystem, rather than create a new one. An Internet user is required to learn something he doesn't even know what it is. I don't know if you feel that. When you first enter the blockchain world, you have to learn blockchain wallets, mnemonics, public and private keys. The bar is high, but the bar is not necessarily high.

What does that mean? We have users of Bitcoin in their own world, we have users of Ethereum in their own world, and we have other chains in their own world. But interoperability 2.0 can bring them all together, not by adding a new standard, but by understanding existing standards and adding existing ecosystems. They don't have to do anything, ethereum, Bitcoin doesn't have to do anything.

Even better, we can integrate into a larger ecosystem. What we're not doing is creating a new architecture that turns the Internet upside down, which is very difficult. Because the Internet has accumulated a lot of value, there are a lot of mature protocols in it, which have been widely used. What we can do is,As a new blockchain world, we are going to embrace the Internet, integrate with it, and build a unified digital economy network on this basis.

That's why we call it interoperability 2.0. If you are more interested in interoperability 2.0, please follow our official account.Nervos Chinese community", there will be more on interoperability 2.0, and we will be releasing more on it in the future.

By the end of this year, we expect to have an interoperability 2.0 application on display, all of it open source, on GitHub, and if you're a developer, please follow us on GitHub:

https://github.com/nervosnetwork