Preface

Hello everyone, long time no see, last time I promised to post about Blockchain, but today I had the opportunity to sit down and write this article to help everyone have a core view of Blockchain platforms. current as well as scaling solutions. For those who do not know, my articles will revolve around topics related to the fields of Backend, Blockchain as well as DevOps , hopefully through sharing knowledge to the community, I will also receive feedback. Contribute to improve skills and improve qualifications in professional fields, as well as articles to talk about career stories and life stories from a personal perspective.

Web3.0 and limits

In the past time, people will hear a lot about the concept of Web3.0, which is said to be the next revolution in the development of the Internet. Web3.0 is based on Blockchain technology and distributed systems that help users have full control over personal data such as identity and assets, as well as reduce the centralization of power in data centers. safely and transparently.

However, the current implementation of Web 3.0 is facing many challenges, many scalability, performance and user experience issues are relatively complex that make it difficult for the majority of ordinary users. Therefore, for Web3.0 to be deployed and widely applied, it is still a long process to improve the problems in the current Blockchain network infrastructure that can hardly be met.

Impossible Triple in Blockchain

In the past time, different Blockchain platforms have sprung up like mushrooms after the rain from Layer0 to Layer2 to solve different problems. However, in my opinion, looking at the essence of every current Blockchain platform, there are 3 aspects of the “impossible triangle” where, depending on specific criteria, there must be choices and trade-offs. fit between 2 out of 3 factors: Distributedness – Security – Extensibility .

In a word, let’s try to imagine in a specific governance organization like a company, a country when the high dispersion in having many opinions in the leadership team will at the same time slow down. decision-making level of that organization, in return for higher safety and transparency. The fact that a country like the US needs to make a decision will require discussion and unification longer than China’s decision to make a policy because of this centralization of power.

In this article, I will dive into the analysis of scalability , which in my opinion is the biggest thing that is preventing Blockchain from becoming widely and easily accessible to everyone and how current Blockchain ecosystems are solving.

Scalability on Blockchain layers

When talking about extensibility we will often approach in two directions: expanding vertically and expanding horizontally. The same goes for Blockchain platforms, the extension can be applied at all different layers depending on the ecosystem from which blockchain layer0 to Blockchain layer2 is produced.

Chúng ta sẽ đi tìm hiểu vậy layer là gì và cơ sở nào để phân biệt một nền tảng Blockchain thuộc một lớp nào đó?

– Layer 0: Hardware, network and data structure

With Blokchain platforms built on layer0, developers will focus on core parts such as hardware tweaking, network transport protocols as well as data restructuring of a Blockchain network. Common representations will include: Cardano, Cosmos, Polkadot,..

– Layer 1: Consensus

With Blockchain ecosystems built at this layer, developers will focus on the trade-off of scalability based on the distributed rule consensus protocol. The representatives are so famous as: Bitcoin (Proof of Work), Ethereum (Proof of Stake) or Solana (Proof of History)..

– Layer 2: Scaling based on L1

Recently, Layer2 solutions have emerged as an approach to expand transactions and reduce costs. Features of these ecosystems are built based on Layer1, with different approaches: State channels, Off-chain, Side-chain, Rollups, Optimistic… are too famous with names like: Polygon, Optimistic, ZKSync,…

– Layer 3: D-App

And there is another layer that people often overlook but still where effective extension measures can be applied: D-Apps. Where we can streamline or group transactions, the service runs and processes to meet the scalability of the application and improve the user experience smoother.

Scalability solutions

After distinguishing the blockchain layers and dividing the respective ecosystems, we will start to dive into the analysis of how current Blockchain networks deploy to solve the scaling problem.

Layer0

The common point of the ecosystems at this level is based on the “divide and conquer” method to solve the problem. Then transactions will be processed in parallel to increase TPS (transaction per second) throughput.

Cardano

The longest growing technology in the history of the Blockchain industry. Cardano takes a divide-and-conquer approach by building an Ouroboros (PoS) network that splits multiple epochs and sharding slots. So far, however, there seem to be no clear results.

Cosmos

For the Cosmos ecosystem, the core of the solution includes the separation between the DApp (Cosmos SDK) and the consensus law (Tendermint Core BFT) as well as the network infrastructure linked through a bridge called ABIC based on the protocol. Inter Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol.

In a word we will have:

Application (Any languages) <-- ABCI (Application Blockchain Interface)--> Networking + Consensus (PoS)

In addition, the Cosmos ecosystem also provides cross-chain solutions such as:

Child-chain: Zones

Bridge: Hub – Peg Hub (Bitcoint, Ethereum)

Polkadot

Coming to Polkadot, this solution approaches in the direction of building 2 types of chains, one for administration and one for running applications:

• Relay chain: Minimize feature -> Governance
• Para chains (stake DOT) + Parathread: DApp

Layer1

Ethereum

In Layer1, we will go into depth analysis of both Ethereum and current on-chain scaling solutions towards Ethereum 2.0. In a word, Ethereum 2.0 will also approach the “divide and conquer” method. At that time, Ethereum will upgrade to Ethereum 2.0, gradually move the PoW consensus law to PoS and conduct Sharding based on Zero Knowledge Proofs.

Current progress Ethereum has successfully implemented The Merge in merging the Ethereum mainnet chain and Beacoin chain in order to gradually move to the PoS consensus law. The next upgrade versions are the preparation steps to prepare for the future Sharding process.

In addition, other Layer1 ecosystems that need attention include Solana and Near. We will also dissect these two platforms, is this really a great Blockchain to solve the scaling problem?

Solana

With Solana, the platform introduces a concept called “consensus law” PoH (proof of history). In my opinion, PoH has been centralized at one point and still needs PoS combination. In a word, Solana solved the timestamp problem that exists on Ethereum:

ETH: Block’s Timestamp will be obtained based on the unix time of each Miner, then broadcast to the whole network.

Leader: Solana solves the timestamp with a single point of focus then automatically attaches this timestamp to the blocks. Thereby minimizing latency but often causing congestion to stop working.

Here Solana has traded Decentralize for Performance, so it still seems impossible to break the impossible triangle that I mentioned above.

On the other hand, we can also consider Solana’s current Validator count of 1800 with TPS reaching 4000. And logically we can easily see that there will always be an inverse ratio. between the number of Validators >< TPS when increasing the TPS will also have to reduce the number of Validators (data taken from August – 2022).

Near

With the Near ecosystem built on the RUST programming language and the solution proceeds in the direction of vertical scaling combined with sharding (night shard) to achieve the target of 100K TPS. However, it is easy to see that reducing the size when scaling vertically will easily cause a 51% attack.

In addition, Near offers Rainbow Bridge bridges and an Aurora Layer2 (EVM) solution.

APTOS/SUI :

Other Layer1 solutions developed by the Google team in recent times such as Aptos or SUI realize extensibility based on the following core principles:

• Block-STM Technology: Sharding + Parallel
• Move Programming Language
• BFT Consensus Protocol

Layer2

Recently, Blockchain Layer2 solutions seem to be exploding with different approaches such as:

• Rollups
• State channels
• Sidechains
• Plasma
• Validium

In the framework of this article, I cannot analyze further, so I would like to see everyone in another article not far away.

Epilogue

In summary, in my opinion, there does not seem to be a perfect Blockchain platform to be able to completely solve the 3 factors in the impossible triangle at the same time. Each platform will have a different solution, and we approach according to the needs that really match the requirements at each time. Revolutionizing the Internet or Web3.0 is in my opinion a right direction, but it will still take a long and further development to perfect in terms of infrastructure and technology in the future.

In the near future, I believe that the most viable solutions will be Layer2 and the far future will still be Ethereum 2.0 in the context that it seems that Layer0 or Layer1 solutions can hardly achieve the desired results.

On the other hand, I would like to reiterate that the little knowledge I have accumulated and accumulated over a long period of work will inevitably make mistakes as well as one-sided subjective judgments. Everyone can comment and give constructive personal opinions in the comments section to help us supplement and improve our knowledge further. If you find the article useful, please leave an upvote to support me mentally to make more new articles. Happy Coding!