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Although the public chain's attention is not as good as before, this track is still the most important track in the encryption field. Before ETH2.0 did not fully prove and siphon everything, there were probabilities and possibilities for everything. The public chain track has always been a trillion-dollar track in the Blue Fox Notes's eyes, and it cannot be ignored at any time. There are many public chains that have come out in the past two years, trying to make breakthrough progress from different technical directions. Due to the technical difficulty of the public chain itself, the progress of the public chain is not as fast as the results of the agreement or application based on the public chain.
The public chain tests people's patience even more. If DeFi can basically be seen whether it can be successful in two to three years, it may take five to ten years for the public chain to fully demonstrate its advantages, but once it blooms, it will be unstoppable. Blue Fox Note has been paying attention to many public chains before, and will continue to pay attention to public chains in the future. Today, Blue Fox's note is talking about NEAR. NEAR is also one of the more well-known public chain projects. Let’s talk about NEAR’s opportunity today. The biggest advantage of Ethereum in the window period before ETH2.0 matures is the ecology of its community, especially the DeFi ecosystem built on Ethereum. At present, the overall market value of DeFi exceeds 6.5 billion U.S. dollars, while Ethereum itself is only more than 26 billion U.S. dollars. That is to say, the market value of DeFi projects based on Ethereum reaches about 25%.
If you count the stablecoin projects, the value of projects based on Ethereum has exceeded 50% of the market value of Ethereum. However, the biggest problem with Ethereum today is its scalability. The current gas fee is very expensive, and the Ethereum fee has continued to exceed the Bitcoin fee. The congestion of Ethereum is a hindrance in its development. High fees are a double-edged sword for Ethereum. On the one hand, it shows that Ethereum is currently the well-deserved king of public chains, attracting a large number of assets and activities, and even BTC has been siphoned over. But on the other hand, the high cost will hinder its development to a larger group, and the cost of a few dollars at every turn is unaffordable for most users. In order to solve this problem, it is mainly through Layer 2 and fragmentation technology. Currently Layer 2 has made some progress, but fragmentation will take a long time.
The real maturity of ETH2.0 takes time. The multi-client network of ETH2.0 phase 0 is still under testing. It is conceivable that the biggest contradiction of Ethereum in the future is between people’s increasing demand for scalability and its development progress. Contradiction. Especially in the current period of DeFi outbreak, the cost is high, and as a result, the daily activity of games based on Ethereum has decreased.
(As the cost of Ethereum rises, the daily activity of the top 5 games in Ethereum has dropped significantly, Source: DappRadar)
Ethereum’s high fees and throughput limitations will leave other public chains before ETH2.0 and Layer2 really bring a large-scale improvement. Next window period. If there is a public chain that can seize the opportunity during the window period, it is not impossible to create a certain miracle. This also includes NEAR.
NEAR's Web3.0 opportunity is currently in open finance, and Ethereum is very strong. This is a big market, and if a parallel financial world can be constructed, it will be enough to support the future path of Ethereum to trillions of dollars. However, in addition to DeFi based on the blockchain, there is also Web3.0.
The space here is also vast, such as games, social networking, e-commerce, and so on. Although Ethereum seized the DeFi track, other tracks did not occupy an absolute advantage. This is the opportunity for other public chains. If there is a public chain that can open up the space of Web3.0 and then return to DeFi, it is not impossible.
DeFi is still very small now. If the superiority of the public chain is proved through the Web3.0 track, then why won't the DeFi project come in? Will do. For NEAR, the Web3.0 track is an entry point for it to enter the public chain market. And its weapon is sharding technology. The public chain dispute between Web3.0 has not really begun. If anyone can make a breakthrough in scalability and find applications that fit the product and market in the ecology of Web3.0, then who will It is the next leading public chain. NEAR's night shadow is the key to realizing its opportunity.
For the public chain, at different stages, its core competitiveness is different. In the early days, its core competitiveness was technical ability. The core of technical capabilities lies in solving the most core problems. At present, the core issue of the public chain is the issue of scalability. Of course, this scalability is based on decentralization and security, otherwise this scalability will be meaningless. In the later stage, the core competitiveness of the public chain is its difficult-to-migrate ecosystem, including users, developers, and communities. From the perspective of the overall situation, the current public chain competition is in an early and late stage. At present, the public chain is mainly based on the DeFi ecology of Ethereum, which forms a certain moat. But even so, this ecological moat has not yet reached an absolutely stable stage. There is still a certain window period. For NEAR, there are two opportunities for it: one is a big opportunity, which may be a big opportunity to break the wrist with Ethereum.
One is to follow the opportunity. Even if you can't wrestle with Ethereum, you can follow closely at the second level and gain a certain market share. As for what kind of opportunities NEAR can get, the key lies in what progress NEAR can make during the window period before ETH2.0 matures. This stage is about 2-3 years. After this, the public chain will no longer have substantial opportunities, unless it is a completely different paradigm.
NEAR's opportunities are large or small, and the core point is its foundation, which is its sharding solution. The sharding solution is directly related to whether it can take the lead in launching a decentralized, secure and scalable blockchain solution before ETH2.0. If NEAR can take the lead in launching its sharding technology and prove its friendliness to developers and users in practice, as well as the relative advantages of its solutions, then it will have the opportunity to seize this window period and build a dApp ecosystem. If not, the follow-up path will not be easy.
What's the difference between NEAR's killer night shadow protocol? NEAR adopts the sharding technology path, and sharding is a mode of horizontal expansion of the blockchain. NEAR's sharding solution is called Night Shade. NEAR's sharding technology features:
NEAR is not the structure of a shard chain
ETH2.0, Harmony, Polkadot, and Cosmos all adopt the shard chain model. For example, the ETH2.0 shard chain consists of a beacon chain and multiple shard chains. The beacon chain is called the relay chain on Polkadot, and the Cosmos Hub on Cosmos. In the traditional shard chain model, the fork selection rules need to be executed on a separate chain, and the fork selection rules of the shard chain and the beacon chain are also different. NEAR maintains a separate main chain, where the blocks of the main chain contain all the states of all shards, but the participants of the network actually only maintain the corresponding state on the shards they participate in verifying transactions. In other words, all transaction lists in a block are equivalent to being divided into "segments", and each block contains these segments. Suppose NEAR has 10 shards, 30 block producers and 1000 validators. Then, each block of the NEAR chain will be divided into 10 parts, and 1000 validators will verify 30 blocks to confirm the correctness of each segment. The figure below is a comparison between the traditional sharding chain and the NEAR block segmentation mode.
NEAR's Doomslug consensus mechanism
The block producers and verifiers of Night Shadow jointly build a single main chain, and the state of the main chain will be divided into n shards. Block producers and verifiers download the state subset corresponding to a certain shard subset locally, and only process and verify transactions that affect this part of the state. The system will assign a block producer to a certain shard and be responsible for the segment of a certain shard in the block. The segment contains the Merkel tree root of the transaction list and result status of a certain shard in the block. NEAR's Doomslug consensus allows a group of block producers to generate blocks in just one round of communication, and also ensures that the blocks can be finalized without more than 1/3 of malicious attackers.
Processing of data availability
Due to the existence of shards, it is necessary to know the status of other shards between shards, otherwise it is impossible to know whether the data is available. In order to ensure data availability, NEAR uses erasure coding technology to solve the problem. A block producer creates a segment, that is, creates an erasure coded version of the segment. Each node divides the blocks it produces into multiple parts and sends them to different validators. Only by relying on a part of them, the fragmented blocks produced by this node can be reorganized. In this way, data availability can be achieved. The erasure code parameter of NEAR is (w,floor(w/6+1)), the segment is divided into w parts, and only the floor(w/6+1) parts need to be collected to reconstruct it.