On July 11 2019, twitter one of the world’s most popular apps, experienced an outage that left many users unable to interact with the platform. This was a day where the president of the United States, Donald Trump was hosting a social media summit at the white house that afternoon. The incident was one of the numerous outages that occurred in 2019. Earlier that year, Instagram and WhatsApp experienced technical glitches which prevented users worldwide from sharing and accessing photos and videos.
Traditional Web hosting sites and apps like those listed above run on a centralized hosting server are often susceptible to a single point of failure and malicious attacks. The Facebook security breach which exposed account of 50 million users further adds a layer of mistrust involving users’ data.
Dapps (Decentralised applications) are applications that are run by many users on a decentralized network with trustless protocols. They are designed to avoid any single point of failure. They typically have tokens to reward users for providing computational services. Dapps have been utilised across various industries ranging from self-verifying and executing smart contracts, games, information management and digital asset exchange among others.
Let’s now illustrate how decentralization dramatically improves on the existing system using a social media network. Currently, it’s estimated that 63.4% of the global population is connected to the internet. Now, imagine a diverse and geographically dispersed user base with every user contributing their system resources toward keeping the social media network running. Imagine None of these individuals know nor trust each other and an attempt to control the network will involve controlling 51% of the entire network resources across the globe. Furthermore, all actors are economically incentivized to secure the network and risk losing their collateral for misbehaving. There’s also the added benefit of having no central authority to censor the network. Censorship can only be achieved through a global consensus on the network.
The potentials of Dapps are near infinite but a Dapp is only as good as its Blockchain . Several factors have limited the growth of Dapp development chiefly Blockchain scalability and usability.
Enter cartesi. A layer 2 platform for the development of scalable decentralised applications. It aims to create a nexus between Blockchain and mainstream Dapp development. Thus, helping software developers who are not familiar with the Blockchain, transition smoothly.
Cartesi provide developers with a vast array of software that evolved in the last 30 years. It is a Linux operating system which enhances the capabilities of Dapps without compromising on the security and guarantee of Blockchain . It is designed to enable Dapp developers access programming languages, tools, libraries and software they are already familiar with.
Blockchain in recent time has experienced scalability issues, exemplified by Bitcoin – the world’s largest Blockchain technology by marketcap, achieving a paltry 15 transactions per second as opposed to credit processing networks which are able to process thousands of transactions per second. High transaction fees as well as throughput issues have also dogged the technology. To solve these challenges, developers have turned to building Layer 1 and layer 2 solutions.
Layer 1 solutions refers to changes in the infrastructure of the base Blockchain itself. These include sharding, increasing blocks sizes, and removing block limits. However, these solutions are not without their drawbacks as they often result in setting up more expensive nodes and centralization of mining pools. This often compromises the tenets of Blockchain such as security, decentralization. An example of this is Ripple, a highly scalable technology that has sacrificed security and decentralization to achieve its goals.
Layer 2 solutions are designed to lighten the burden of processing power and fees of the base Blockchain by carrying out complex processing and data off chain. The Blockchain structure does not need to be altered as a great amount of work can be performed by the second layer. While the base layer offers security, the second layer provides higher scalability and throughput. Examples include plasma and side chain. However, majority of layer 2 solutions tend to focus on a particular Blockchain , neglecting the rest.
Cartesi is unlike the existing. It is chain agnostic, meaning developers can easily port their apps across different Blockchains. Dapps developed on Cartesi platform allows for the creation of self-verifying and executing smart contracts between parties. In any event of a dispute that occurs offchain, Cartesi offers a dispute resolution protocol to arbitrate any and all disputes.
For more information:
Website: https://cartesi.io/
Whitepaper: https://cartesi.io/cartesi_whitepaper.pdf
Author details:
Bitcointalk profile link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1503327
Email: samistry1061@gmail.com