Here is the final nail in the coffin to prove why #NEAR is the Future of Blockchains 🤙🏽

Let’s explore Doomslug ❤️

Yesterday, I went to a Pizzeria and after placing the order, I made the payment through a debit card.

As soon as I make the payment, its owner smiled at me and signaled that the transaction is finalized. He is now sure that he’ll receive the money in his account. Had I made the payment in cash, this transaction would have been finalized in a moment 💰

The finalization of the transaction signals irreversibility. It shows that once a transaction goes through, it can not be reversed and the money received won’t be lost.

In Blockchains, finalizing transactions at lightning speed becomes crucial to ensure the Safety and Scalability of the network. The lesser the Finality Time, the more transactions can be recorded and finalized in a moment.

Apart from that, **Block Time **is another important factor.

Block Time refers to the time taken to produce a block after validating from participants known as Block Producers. If there are 2B+1 block producers in the network, even if B+1 blocks are online and honest, the network will keep functioning properly.

NEAR Protocol Uses Doomslug's novel consensus mechanism to produce blocks along with Nightshade Finality Gadget for finalizing blocks.

Doomslug ensures that the blocks produced are secure and irreversible as long as there are no slashed block producers (bad actors 👀)

How does Slashing secure Block Production?

Suppose there are two blocks proposed at the same height, A and B. If 66.66% of stakers vote on A and 66.66% vote on B, then 33.33% of them are malicious. Slashing their stake ensures such bad actors stay away from the block production process.

Blocks produced by Doomslug are irreversible unless at least one participant is slashed. Thus, Slashing makes sure that Block Production reaches absolute finality in the shortest time possible.

To foolproof the consensus mechanism, Nightshade Finality Gadget is tasked with verifying the block production process. Most BFT consensus mechanisms require over 2/3 of honest and online validators in the network. With Doomslug + NFG, NEAR can produce blocks with just over 50% good validators.

TLDR Version:

1. Doomslug makes sure the blocks produced are secure and irreversible by slashing bad actors

2. **Nightshade Finality Gadget **ensures absolute finality is reached in the least time possible

The technology and team behind NEAR are very awesome and that’s where my belief lies. In case of any queries or suggestions, my DMs on Twitter are open ✉️

Don’t forget to like and share the blog with your friends!! This motivates me to write even better threads and articles 🤙🏽

Sometimes these are good sources of alpha, while many times these are crafted shilling pitches. So why another comparison? And specifically Solana vs NEAR?

Let’s answer all these questions with the help of this article.

My Blockchain Development Journey

Solana was the first L1 blockchain where I started my BUIDLing journey. Broadly, there were two main reasons:

1. My Web3 mentor suggested to me, and

2. It had numerous benefits like speed and low gas

I built a cool NFT-minting dApp on Solana that lets anybody convert an image into an NFT and stored it on the network. Interestingly, I applied for Solana India Fellowship in Jan 2022 and got shortlisted in the first round. Everything was going well.

So why did I make the switch to NEAR?

The Blockchain Trilemma

There exist some key principles which make any project a true blockchain network 💯 This was termed a Blockchain Trilemma by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. It says that every network should have:

1. Decentralization,

2. Security, and

3. Scalability

But the inherently complex architecture of Blockchains makes it hard to implement all three features simultaneously.

Bitcoin is by far the most decentralized and secure network from all perspectives. But scalability is its biggest bottleneck. We miss you, Satoshi Nakamoto!!

Ethereum on the other hand is a very popular L1 blockchain. But it lacks scalability and people have been waiting for a long time for Ethereum 2.0

Its current Transactions per Second (TPS) is quite low compared to existing Web2 solutions. For instance, Ethereum’s 30 TPS is no match for financial behemoth Visa, which processes over 100k TPS 😅

Simply put, building a network that can onboard Billion+ of users to Web3 is a tough task. And Scalability is its Achilles’ Heel 🔱

Solana was launched to bring the dream of ultra-high TPS into Reality. And you know what;

They Actually Did. At the cost of Security 🤌🏽 But how?

An important fact 🔔

48% of $SOL Tokens are allocated to Venture Capitalists, and the Company itself.

Such insane private ownership certainly raises legitimate questions on the oligarch nature of Solana.

Solana & Security

Security is the most important aspect of the Blockchain Trilemma. It’s more like an overall pyramid structure where Security is the bottom-most layer having the highest significance. Decentralization takes time (by increasing nodes) while Scalability is a lifelong process 🤌🏽

For every Proof-of-Stake chain, tokens are the rewards that also maintain its security. Everybody wants to win staking and delegation rewards 🤤 But what if some malicious transaction passes through and corrupts the network?

To counter this, Slashing is implemented. Whenever malicious transactions are committed, some portion of staked tokens by the validator is slashed (reduced) as a punishment.

What’s important to know is that Solana hasn’t yet implemented Slashing into their network. No automated slashing for sure till now. Multiple exploits and outages due to network congestion have happened on Solana in the past.

Nobody can forget the $320mn Wormhole Bridge heist. This attack exploited some unpatched Rust contracts in Solana. Although the issue was fixed, it was a big 🚩for me to leave Solana 👋🏼

Also, Scalability will soon become a bottleneck for Solana in the future. Since it uses Vertical Scaling, it would demand more powerful Validator Nodes. This proposes serious technical limitations which can’t be easily overcome. Sharding is the most viable solution to scale blockchain networks for now.

Why NEAR Protocol?

NEAR is a truly decentralized network that has successfully implemented all three features of the Blockchain Trilemma.

Starting from Security, NEAR has implemented Automatic Slashing by default. Validators are fearful of losing their stakes upon committing bad transactions.

For scalability, NEAR has implemented the most advanced Sharding design on Earth i.e., Nightshade.

Also, it has the fastest block finality time thanks to Doomslug.

Cross-chain communication has been at the core of NEAR from the beginning. In Nightshade, each shard acts like a separate chain that can cross-communicate with other chains asynchronously, thanks to State sharding 🤌🏽

NEAR Protocol has been building the future of Web3 for a very long time. And now, all of it has started to take shape.

• Nodes will increase over time leading to more decentralization.

• Security is already guaranteed pretty much with no exploits reported to date.

• Nightshade makes sure that NEAR scales to Billions of users positively 🤙🏽

I even proudly tell everybody that NEAR Protocol is a certified Carbon-neutral and environment-friendly blockchain network. And it’s our duty to support projects that advance our technology without causing detrimental effects on the nature 🤞🏽🍀

Disclaimer:

Whatever you read above are facts 💯 I am not an official member of NEAR Protocol neither I do promotions. I am also not a shilling agent who sells you shitcoins 😮‍💨

I am not asking you to invest in NEAR. But am surely asking you to come and build the Future with NEAR #TheFutureisNear 🤙🏽🚀

If you liked reading this article, you can do me a favor by sharing this with your network. Once again, thank you so much for paying attention.

Will be back with another article on Doomslug soon. Till then, Sayonara 👋🏼

Imagine when someone sends you a notification on WhatsApp, how quickly you realize that you have received a text message. You go and check out their messages and respond.

Even bank Credit/Debit transactions, you get notified all the time of what’s happening in your digital ID. Be it your social media applications or your gaming apps, notifications are everywhere.

But all this was freely available in Web2.0 cult. But coming to the world of Web3.0, there was no such specific dApp which served real-time notifications.

Wait!! No, I am not talking about how @binance sends you notifications after transactions completion. Those are Centralized Exchanges (CEX) buddy 😅

I am referring to the absence of native notifications powered by decentralized Apps.

If you regularly use DeFi apps, you must be at times surprised how you got unexpectedly liquidated. Your decentralized application simply has no feature to wake you up from your deep sleep. No alerts. Nothing !!

Notifications become super important when your money is at risk 😷

OR Maybe you are an NFT enthusiast (OG Flippoooor 👀) watching out for some rare collectibles on platforms like @opensea or @MagicEden. You want a notification as soon as the item is available on the marketplace. But what do you get? No alerts. Nothing again!!

Web3 getting too silent eh? 🔔

Welcome to Ethereum Push Notification Service

EPNS is World’s first notification service that enables sending notifications on decentralized apps across Blockchain networks. It’s a chain agnostic protocol that can easily expand into other blockchain networks and natively support their dApps. Currently they support Ethereum and have plans to extend into other blockchains soon (wen NEAR?)

Very very important for all those lending/borrowing dApps on Compound and Aave. Good luck guys to launch into these chains soon in the future ❤️

How can some dApp benefit from this?

If we plan to onboard next billion into Web3 ecosystem, we require two crucial components:1. Better UX2. Better Educational Content

And both processes take time to evolve. Notifications can be a great way to improve User eXperience. How?

EPNS offers each dApp on Ethereum network to register itself as a channel on the EPNS service. dApps are required to submit minimum 50 DAI as listing fee. After listing, users of a dApp can officially subscribe to receive notifications from the dApp’s channel available on EPNS.

There are other methods to chose upon how to receive these notifications. Once done, users will start receiving notifications on their Android/iOS/Web apps. dApps can notify:

• All users at once

• One user at a time

• Group of users at a time

These notifications can be presented both on-chain and off-chain. In case you want the notifications on-chain, you will have to pay the Gas fee for Ethereum dApps. But no worries, their team is planning to launch soon on Polygon that will offer negligible gas in the future.

Decentralized Apps can also chose to delegate some user accounts to broadcast notifications on their behalf on the channel. This process is pretty much straightforward to setup and hassle free even while removing delegators. This feature gives you the true essence of Decentralization 🦄

And a Bonus happy cookie for You» 🍪

All of the notifications are **incentivized **💲 The listing fee submitted by dApps is staked on AAVE to generate returns which gets distributed in a fair share ratio to subscribers of the channel.

Creating value for everyone 🔔

With the launch of $PUSH token, EPNS is rapidly expanding its governance methods and rewarding people who got early into their ecosystem. It also has a #Rockstar NFT and Airdrop program that supports ambassadors of the network to earn an NFT and 2,400 $PUSH tokens every week. Want to know more about that? Check out below medium blog for more details 👇

https://medium.com/ethereum-push-notification-service/kicking-off-the-epns-nft-community-drops-6a5c49808cf

Interesting Usecases:

1. You can create a decentralized blog where you could post content & then create a channel on EPNS for the blog. This way every time a new post is made, subscribers can be notified instantly. EPNS supports modern-age notifications packed with Links & Call-to-Action buttons.

2. ENS domains on Ethereum could setup a status dApp in the future and broadcast their statuses to friends using the same 🐣

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the Gitbook documentation of EPNS available here. In case you wanna have a deeper understanding, it’s a must read resource. I hope this article creates a better mental model and ignite curiosity for EPNS in your neurons.

To be honest, I am eagerly waiting for them to launch on #NEAR in the future!!

In case you enjoyed reading through this article, don’t forget to share and subscribe to Decoding Blockchain newsletter 🤝🏽 I will be back soon with another interesting article on Ethereum vs Solana vs NEAR.

Till then, Sayonara 👋🏼

Hey Ethereum 2.0, where are you buddy? As you know, the burning sensation in Ethereum’s stomach created need for an advanced mechanism of scaling networks. This technology is called Sharding.

Interested to know Sharding in depth? Check out my earlier explanation below 👇

How Nightshade Sharding Works?

Traditional sharding treats each shard like another blockchain. These shards work side-by-side to produce chunks. Nodes producing the chunks are called Producer Nodes. While, nodes that verify transactions on a shard are called Validator Nodes or VNs.

Sharding reduces validators available for verifying each transaction. Let’s suppose that earlier every transaction was validated by 100 VNs. If 10 shards are created on main chain, each shard can process one transaction that gets verified by just 10 validators now as compared to 100 earlier.

This increases chances of 51% attack on chain. How?

Earlier, if 51% validators of a chain agreed upon a faulty transaction, it will be processed. Now only 5.1% can agree to corrupt that shard which will corrupt whole network.

Some argue that Validators get financial rewards, so they won’t cheat. What if the network has multi-billion dollars worth of transactions?

This problem is known as Adaptive Corruption 📝

To solve this issue, what NEAR does is that it conceals “Which Validator verifies Which Chunk on Which Shard”. Quite similar to Algorand, in many ways better than them. This creates a robust ecosystem for future applications to be securely powered on the Near Protocol.

Now, coming back to Shards. Each shard resembles a chain, where local parts of global state are stored in that particular shard & transactions are processed. This ensures both process sharding and state sharding can co-exist on the network. Absolutefuckingly genius 🧠

Process-sharding means when processing of transactions is divided into separate shards having their own validator nodes 😉 Most L1s that implement sharding have this. So what’s unique about NEAR? State-Sharding 🧞‍♂️

So, State basically refers to the storage used by blockchain networks. With growing block sizes each day, state sharding is the necessity of future applications. Most L1s don’t have state sharding. This is what makes NEAR unique and far-focused.

With state sharding, shard chains can cross-communicate with each other and share useful data, call other contracts existing on different shards, and change state asynchronously.

Unique Consensus Mechanism

Now comes the settlement aka consensus mechanism. Blockchains usually settle blocks through two primary techniques:

1. Longest chain method

2. Byzantine Fault Tolerance method

So what does NEAR do? It combines both of them 😨 Hybrid architecture 🙌🏽

The two revolutionary techniques that Nightshade brings on table are:

1. State Sharding, which enables cross-shard communications (also the future of cross-chain compatibility 👀)

2. A Hybrid Consensus mechanism

Now, the whole piece of Nightshade technology is set to launch in three phases. Only Phase 1 has been released till date. Also, there is a lot more to explain and even much more to learn which won’t fit into the context of this article. So I’ll suggest anyone who is interested must look at the NEAR Nightshade Whitepaper below👇🏽

Sharding Design: Nightshade

I hope this article exposes so many good details of @NEARProtocol and how it’s the complete blockchain network in existence at the moment.

Decentralized. Secure. Scalable.

No doubt when we NEARians say #TheFutureisNear. If you liked this article, please consider sharding it with your community. I’ll meet you in the next very very interesting article on Solana vs Near Protocol.

Till then, Sayonara 👋🏼

After my last article, I am sure that you guys are well aware about how zK-Proofs work. In case you haven’t already, please check out my Patrick-Virginia example from the below tweet.

I promise you it’s the most lucid explanation on Crypto Twitter 🤤

https://twitter.com/pythontony/status/1502895063730323456

What happens in traditional zero-Knowledge Proofs?

Each time Patrick has to Prove that he knows the spell, he has to interact with Virginia. She asks him to come from either of paths (A or B) and then only verification happens.

Now this process definitely takes time. Calling Patrick again & again only to prove something he already knows is a cumbersome process. Both for the Prover and Verifier. This causes extra computational overheads in Blockchain networks as well as unwanted interaction. What do we do?

This is where comes the most revolutionary confluence of Mathematics and Cryptography. Buckle up your brain for a ride 🧠 Some serious Maths BS coming ⛩

I believe you all know that roots of a 2D curve or polynomial are the points on X-axis where its value equals to Zero. Check this hand-drawn illustration below:

That means if I tell you the exact root of an expression, I should probably be knowing the polynomial too. Right?

But I can also guess the roots if equation is of sufficiently small degree.

High efficiency computers can easily guess the roots by sending random numbers at scale. Agreed!

What if the polynomial used has a degree 10? With unimaginable coefficients? And unreal roots except few of them. Cracking roots of such an expression is next to impossible. Its probability is infinitesimally small but not exactly zero.

Still, it’s way better than cracking hashes of a bunch of transactions and verifying if they are correct or not while exposing all transaction data to the chain 👀

What are SNARKs?

🔸 Succinct means small proofs

🔸 Non-interactive means no interference of Verifier

🔸 ARgument of Knowledge

Overall, this means that you possess info to some polynomial function, that can help you prove your knowledge of the expression w/o revealing the expression.

What are its uses?

• We know that blockchains are public ledgers. Anybody can go and check the details of each and every transaction. This proposes a major threat to data security & anonymity. A short & non-interactive proving mechanism will form the privacy layer of Blockchains.

• Suppose you want to open up a bank account. They ask for your personal info. With the invent of zK-SNARKs, you can verify your info through simple methods without revealing crucial details.

Privacy is absolute necessary for building a truly anonymous and decentralized internet 🔆 Don’t forget to check out Vitalik’s tweet in this context.

https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1433228277263462401

Apart from fixing major privacy issues, zK-SNARKs can be utilized to reduce block sizes on highly crowded networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum. @MinaProtocol has succeeded in building a Layer-1 blockchain where block sizes are just 22kB. This paves path for carbon-neutral and highly efficient networks🍀

Kudos @evanashapiro & the team building Mina Protocol 🔥

TLDR Version; zK-SNARKs are basically privacy enhancement solutions on traditional Layer-1 blockchains. They can also be used to optimize efficiency of the blockchain network. I wonder if someone is out there building Bitcoin + zK-SNARK framework. Best of luck to you buddy 🚀

What lies ahead 🦄

Privacy will soon become the mainstream concern for all L-1 chains and zK-SNARKs is arguably the best solution out there. Furthermore, efficiency of networks can be increased through SNARKs.

Decentralization + Scalability + Security + Anonymity = Future ❤️

Some useful resources to study in-depth about SNARKs:

Why zk-SNARK Is The Future Of Blockchain?

Introduction to zk-SNARKS | ConsenSys

If you enjoyed reading this article, you may subscribe to my newsletter and I will make sure you stay up-to-date with latest technology in Web3 and Blockchain.

In case you wanna chat n discuss something, DMs are open on Twitter @pythontony ✉️

Let’s start with a simple analogy. Suppose you have two persons: Patrick and Virginia. Take a look at the picture now. There is a tunnel which divides into two paths marked as A and B.

A and B are separated by a magic door which opens only when magic spell is whispered near the doo

Patrick wants to prove to Virginia that he has the magical spell. But Virginia won’t trust him until he proves his powers. Patrick ain’t willing to tell this magical spell to Virginia so they decide to work upon a challenge.

Virginia tells Patrick to go inside the tunnel from the main entrance. Choose any of the paths which he likes: A or B. After Patrick goes in, Virginia will wait for him at the V-point. Virginia will shout either ‘A’ or ‘B’ and Patrick has to come out from that path.

Suppose Patrick goes on Path A, and Virginia asks him to come from Path B, he can do so by opening the magic door. So he should be knowing the spell.

OR MAYBE,

Patrick goes on Path A, and Virginia asks him to come from Path A, he can do that without knowing the spell.

At any given call by Virginia, Patrick can either come from that path or he can’t.

If Patrick doesn’t know the magical spell, probability of him coming out through the right pathway is 1/2 or 0.5 here. Therefore, if only one round of testing is done by Virginia, Patrick may fool her half of the times without even knowing the spell.

So Virginia decides to take this test multiple times. Let’s say 20 times. If she takes this same test 20 times simultaneously, Patrick has to come out from the aforementioned path 20 times correctly.

Mathematically, there can be 2^20 possibilities or 1,048, 576 outcomes. Only 1 out of these ~1 million ways will have Patrick coming out on the right pathway every time.

Chances of Fooling Virginia: 9.53e-7 or Negligible 😲

Outcome of this Challenge 🦄

Patrick successfully proved to Virginia if he has the magical spell or not without even telling her. Virginia authenticated if Patrick has the spell or not. Voila!! You now have the basic mental model of zK Proofs.

As you know, traditional proofing algorithms expose crucial data to Verifier systems, which causes significant risk in the future.

zK-Proofing gives a method to prove to the Verifier that you have performed some computation or operation without exposing the internal details.

Interesting Usecases 😉

This technique will be used someday for Nuclear Disarmament of countries without them exposing any detail related to their Nuclear Missile systems. It will also become an integral part of blockchain networks to improve privacy on-chain.

Implementation of zK-Proofs have been extended using technologies that could also help in scaling blockchain networks like Ethereum. Example: zK-SNARK, zK-Rollups & zK-STARK.

I will be covering them in upcoming articles and threads on my twitter profile @pythontony

Here are some resources I would recommend you to check out:

• Zero-knowledge proof - Wikipedia

• Zero-Knowledge Blog

If you enjoyed reading this content, retweet for better reach. It encourages me to share more such lucid explanations 😅😉

From the time since its inception, scalability has been a big concern for Blockchain networks.

As blockchains become mainstream, its essential for networks to be scalable with high throughput for explosive growth.

Low gas fees + Ultra high TPS = Growth 🚀

Initially, vertical scaling was the dominant solution. Simply explained, add more power to all the nodes so they can compute hash and validate transactions faster.

But there is a maxima to the technological advancement of nodes. This limits the total network throughput.

Since, data from whole blockchain resides on each node of the network, this causes significant latency.

To counter this technical limitation, blockchain networks started looking into horizontal scaling solutions.

Here comes the legendary Sharding approach 👉🏽

What is Sharding⁉️

Sharding is originally a database partitioning methodology. Explaining through an example:

Suppose you have a Database with extremely huge number of rows of records. Sharding this database can be done by separating rows of a table into multiple different tables, known as partitions.

Each partition has the same schema and columns, but also entirely different rows with unique data.

For blockchain networks, it basically distributes data present on-chain into all the available nodes.

New block can be added by processing on a node while remaining nodes continue processing other transactions. This ensures scalability of network which is an important pillar of Blockchain Trilemma.

Also, randomly shuffling the data between nodes & shards prevents major ~Shard Overtake Attacks~ too. Ultimately, security & speed is the key to bring next billion people on chain 🚀

Technical know-how of how shards are defined and used is dependent on Blockchain networks. Broadly, two types of sharding exists for chains: Homogeneous and Heterogeneous

Homogeneous shards use same runtime and same validation logic across all the shards. This allows them to implement dynamic resharding. A great example is NEAR Protocol.

Heterogeneous sharding on the other hand allows blockchains to feasibly create a shard that fits into specific application requirements. Each blockchain can be configured completely anew. This is more suited for chains like Polkadot and Cosmos.

Sayonara 👋🏼

I hope this article has trained your mental neurons so well that next time you see somebody saying sharding, you can absolutely debate without hesitating.

Hey Ashutosh, what if they shouting zkRollups? Or Tokenomics? Or NFTs & DAOs? Well in that case, you can subscribe to this blog and I’ll make sure you don’t miss out on your regular dose of Crypto Literacy.

I am quite active on Twitter. If you wanna discuss something, you can always DM me @pythontony.

In the next article, we will understand how zero-knowledge Proofs work. Till then, goodbye and keep exploring ❤️