The Birth of Conflux OS: Building an Operating System Level Blockchain Infrastructure

Original source: Conflux 

At the press conference of the Conflux OS operating system on September 21, 2022, Shanghai Tree Figure Blockchain Research Institute released the Conflux OS operating system for Web3.0. The press conference was guided by the Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Commission and the People's Government of Xuhui District, Shanghai, hosted by the Shanghai Treemap Blockchain Research Institute, and co-organized by the Hunan Xiangjiang Treemap Information Technology Innovation Center.

Conflux Professor Long Fan, founder of Treemap and director of Shanghai Treemap Blockchain Research Institute, introduced Conflux OS products and product development background; Dr. Yang Guang, research director of Shanghai Treemap Blockchain Research Institute, explained Conflux OS in detail from a technical perspective .

Background

In today's world, technological innovation is the primary productive force, and the Internet revolution is our closest and most intuitive experience of this innovative concept. It has been 53 years since the birth of the Internet in the world, and 28 years since China's full-featured access to the Internet. In the past 28 years, China's Internet has developed magnificently and quickly became the first driving force of productivity, driving the high-quality development of China's economy in an all-round way. The digital economy has become a new engine, new highlight, and new momentum for China's economic development. As of 2021, the scale of my country's digital economy will reach 45.5 trillion, ranking second in the world in total.

The Internet is a human communication technology The great revolution of the 19th century had an extremely profound impact on human society. With the current iterative innovation of various information technologies, the Internet is showing a trend of evolution to the next generation Internet. This evolution may lead to a new round of information revolution, which will further profoundly change people's life, work and all aspects of society. In 1993, on the eve of the advent of Web1.0, the Clinton administration of the United States issued a "National Information Infrastructure" strategic plan to vigorously build a "highway" in the information age, thereby gaining the global leadership of Web1.0 and Web2.0. After 30 years of development, the Internet is now at an important point in the evolution from Web2.0 to Web3.0.

Different from technical fields The common way of dividing generations by technical indicators (such as 2G/3G/4G/5G in the field of mobile communications or 28nm/16nm/7nm process in the field of chips, etc.), the division of Web1.0, Web2.0, and Web3.0 is different. It is not in the technical indicators, but in the form of generating and processing data. If the former is summarized as the development stage of productivity, the latter actually corresponds to different stages of production relations in the digital world.

In short, Web1 .0 is characterized by a reading-oriented "information Internet", professional websites (such as portals) are responsible for producing content, and users are content consumers; Web2.0 is characterized by "readable + writable" "social "Internet" and "interactive Internet", emphasizing "interaction, sharing, and relationship". With the development of mobile Internet and network platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and WeChat, users, as the main producers of content, spread their own works on the Internet (including text, pictures, videos, etc.) and interact with other users. Regardless of Web1.0 or Web2.0, the Internet platform can rely on the control over data and algorithms to obtain the right to formulate rules and distribute benefits, and users lack autonomy in front of the Internet platform.

Features of Web3.0 It is the "Internet of Value" and "Internet of Contract" that are "readable + writable + ownable", emphasizing user-centered "autonomy", giving users the autonomy to manage digital identities, control personal data, and supervise the application of algorithms. This reshapes the trust and collaborative relationship among Internet participants. Therefore, Web3.0 replaces the "black box" of the Internet platform with rules written in code, making the process of information processing fairer and more transparent, and guaranteeing the creator's ownership and income rights of the work through digital contracts, which can realize the ever-changing A digital production relationship that better matches digital content productivity.

In order to realize Web3.0 The autonomy we are pursuing can no longer rely on the centralized server of the Internet platform to process data information. A neutral and credible computing platform must be established as the digital infrastructure of Web3. The collection, circulation, storage, processing, distribution and other links of the network complete the replacement of the centralized platform. The blockchain consensus system is such a computing platform: the blockchain consensus nodes jointly maintain the data recorded in the blockchain ledger, calculate according to the smart contract code and reach a consensus on the results. In fact, a virtual computer is implemented in the consensus system , can provide neutral and credible data storage and computing services to the outside world. By invoking the blockchain consensus system, Web3.0 applications can ensure the credibility of key data and key computing links from being tampered with by malicious control.

But on the other hand, Calling the blockchain consensus system to complete data storage and computing tasks is different from the traditional new computing model based on centralized servers (including distributed systems and cloud computing), and the technical threshold is relatively high, especially when it involves adapting multiple blocks The chain consensus system will be more complicated. Let application developers directly face the underlying consensus storage and consensus calculation of Web3.0, and develop applications for each blockchain system, which will inevitably waste a lot of energy, which is not a good solution. Therefore, in order to reduce the threshold and cost of application development and allow application developers to focus more on business logic, it is necessary to uniformly manage underlying distributed and multi-source heterogeneous computing resources technically, and provide packaged interfaces for application developers.

Such unified management and A system that schedules underlying computing resources and provides a development and operating environment for upper-level applications is called an "operating system" in the era of PCs and smartphones. With the evolution of the Web3.0 information processing paradigm, the development of the Web3.0 industry also needs a matching operating system. This is the background for developing the Conflux OS operating system.

Conflux OS Operating System

Conflux OS is a network operating system that follows the Web3.0 computing paradigm and manages and schedules Web3.0 underlying computing resources. Its running carrier is not a single computer or smartphone, but the entire Web3.0 network. Roughly speaking, the core computing resources of Conflux OS do not come from local CPU, memory, hard disk and other hardware, but public services in the Web3.0 network, including data storage and computing capabilities provided by the blockchain consensus system, Data storage services provided by IPFS, computing services provided by third-party service providers (based on trusted computing technologies such as TEE, MPC, and FHE), etc. Conflux OS ensures the neutrality and credibility of data storage and computing by managing and scheduling these resources from Web3.0 network public services, and helps Web3.0 applications realize user autonomy over identities, data, and algorithms.

Conflux OS There are four levels:

1.  User client: In form, it is a program running locally on the user (mobile phone, PC), providing users with access to Web3.0 resources and applications, including Web3.0 browsers, application markets, personal accounts and digital Identity management and other functions, and provide a graphical operation interface for running other Web3.0 applications. At present, Conflux OS mainly provides mobile apps as user clients.

2. Productivity Tools: Productivity tools for Web3.0 application operators, including NFT kits, DAO community kits, etc., realize out-of-the-box and code-free development through a graphical interface, lowering the technical threshold for producing and using Web3.0 products. The kit also provides an extensible API interface to support lightweight custom development and a variety of product forms. Conflux OS will also launch productivity tools for other application scenarios.

3. Development environment: For Web3.0 application developers, Conflux OS will provide the front-end component library of the UI interaction layer and the development framework for middle and back-end business in the form of open source, the middleware in the form of SDK or Web API, and the foundation of test network and sandbox environment Serve. Web3.0 application developers can implement custom business logic within the existing development framework, and complete development tasks quickly and efficiently in the form of low-code development.

4. Underlying infrastructure : Manage and schedule computing resources from the Web3.0 network, including selecting and locating blockchain consensus nodes, reading and writing data and performing computing tasks based on blockchain systems. Conflux OS will first access the treemap public chain and the treemap alliance chain at the bottom layer as the infrastructure for carrying the consensus storage and consensus computing of Web3.0 applications. In the future, it will also connect to other Web3.0 resources such as Ethereum and IPFS.

Conflux OS application The layer interface will implement the IEEE P3217 "Blockchain System Application Interface Specification" international standard under development (this standard is led by the Shanghai Tree Map Blockchain Research Institute), providing the greatest degree of compatibility for other Web3.0 applications.

The significance of the Conflux OS operating system

Similar to the operating systems of PCs and smartphones, Conflux OS, as a Web3.0 operating system, realizes a reasonable division of labor between system developers, application developers, and operators. A unified system interface and application development and operating environment effectively reduces the technical cost of developing and operating Web3.0 applications, allowing developers and operators to focus more on business logic, which is beneficial to the Web3.0 application ecology and even the entire "Metaverse" booming industry.

For Web3.0 and In the metaverse environment where multiple chains coexist and technologies are rapidly iterated, Conflux OS provides a unified interface to the application layer by encapsulating the underlying heterogeneous blockchain system, which can effectively solve the difficulty of cross-chain information intercommunication and the adaptation cost of multi-chain deployment advanced questions. By integrating the underlying blockchain system, Conflux OS is expected to bridge the fragmented ecology of the current Web3.0 industry to a certain extent.

Conflux OS also provides users with Provides a one-stop Web3.0 terminal entrance, not only assisting users to manage personal digital identities conveniently and quickly, but also providing audited safe and reliable applications through the Web3. loss.

To sum up, Conflux OS The significance for Web3.0 and the metaverse industry lies in the improvement of production efficiency through division of labor and the promotion of application ecological development; the significance for users lies in the provision of a convenient, easy-to-use, and safe terminal entrance, as well as rich and diverse Web3.0 applications .

Supplementary Information: Tree Map Blockchain

The tree-graph consensus algorithm is a high-performance consensus sorting algorithm that uses a tree-graph structure (Tree-Graph) to organize blocks. This algorithm can reach a consensus on the sorting of concurrent blocks Therefore, without sacrificing openness and security, it breaks through the performance bottleneck of the existing blockchain system in terms of transaction throughput (TPS) and confirmation latency (Confirmation Latency). On a blockchain network consisting of tens of thousands of consensus nodes using proof-of-work (PoW), the tree-graph consensus algorithm achieves a high throughput rate of over 6000 TPS while shortening the confirmation time to within 23 seconds. In contrast, the throughput rates of Bitcoin and Ethereum are only 7 TPS and 40 TPS, and require confirmation times as long as 1 hour and 10 minutes, respectively. In the field of blockchain underlying technology, the tree graph consensus algorithm has broken the monopoly position of Western countries, and its innovation and advancement have attracted widespread attention from academia and industry, and it has become Facebook's Diem (formerly known as Libra) The only Chinese-led blockchain project mentioned in the technical white paper of the alliance chain project.

Tree graph public chain ( Conflux) is a high-performance public blockchain underlying infrastructure based on the tree graph consensus algorithm, with a design throughput of 3000 TPS, which is 428 times that of Bitcoin and 75 times that of Ethereum. The main network of the treemap public chain was officially launched on October 29, 2020. At present (as of September 15, 2022), the total number of accounts exceeds 24 million, the total number of transactions exceeds 114 million, and the number of consensus nodes online at the same time exceeds 5,000 (ranked among the top three in the world), with world-leading performance and security. With the support of stable cross-chain services and rich developer tools, the Treemap public chain has incubated hundreds of ecological projects.

The tree map alliance chain is High-performance blockchain underlying infrastructure optimized for alliance chain scenarios. Tested by the China Electronics Standardization Institute (CESI Laboratory), the treemap alliance chain version 1.0 can achieve a throughput rate of more than 20,000 TPS in a network of 100 consensus nodes, reaching the world's leading level in both scale and performance. When the treemap alliance chain realizes the above-mentioned network scale and consensus performance, the hardware configuration of a single consensus node only needs 8-core CPU/16 GB memory/100M network, which is far lower than the hardware requirements of other similar alliance chains in China. "The highest alliance chain.

Supplementary information: IEEE P3217 standard

IEEE P3217 "Blockchain System Application Interface Specification" defines and regulates blocks The interactive interface between the blockchain layer and the application layer of the chain system aims to standardize the interaction mode between the blockchain application and the blockchain consensus system, so that application layer developers can be freed from the details of the underlying consensus system , you only need to focus on business logic without having to be familiar with the differences of various blockchain systems.

If the blockchain The block chain layer and application layer of the system are analogous to the operating system and application software of a traditional computer, and the role of the IEEE P3217 standard is similar to the IEEE 1003 "Portable Operating System Interface" (Portable Operating System Interface) that defines the UNIX operating system interface. System Interface, abbreviated as POSIX) standard, also known as ISO/IEC 9945 standard.

POSIX is IEEE for convenience A general term for a series of API standards defined to develop and run software on different versions of the UNIX operating system. Software developed in accordance with the POSIX standard can be easily ported to all POSIX-compliant operating systems, which is especially important for open source software that does not depend on specific operating systems, so the standard has been widely recognized by the industry and the open source software community. Common operating systems such as macOS and Solaris have obtained the official IEEE POSIX certification. Although Android, Linux, and Darwin (the core of macOS and iOS) have not received official certification, they are actually compatible with the POSIX standard. Microsoft’s Windows NT is also partially certified. Implements the POSIX standard.

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