The Blockchain Institute at University of Kansas is proud to announce the formation of our Industry Advisory Board. Our board is comprised of accomplished individuals with expertise in a variety of fields of related to the blockchain space who share our enthusiasm to educate the student body and university faculty about this nascent, yet disruptive technology. We are incredibly grateful for their insight and support as we continue to grow this new organization.

Industry Advisory Board Members

CJ Obermaier

DevOps Engineer

CJ is a DevOps Engineer in Kansas City who has been involved in blockchain development and research for a little over a year. In his free time, he is a core organizer for DevOpsDays KC tech conference, and enjoys to travel with his wife and two dogs. Crazily enough, CJ’s relationship with the Institute began when he met the Institute’s Founder, Michael Catt, on the Ark Ecosystem’s Slack channel chatting about blockchain. He will be demoing the Truffle Suite Framework for smart contract development to KU’s Association for Computer Machinery Oct. 10th.

Caroline Lynch

Founder and owner of Copper Hill Strategies, LLC.

Caroline has fifteen years of Capitol Hill experience, including a decade with the House Judiciary Committee where she served for eight years as the Chief Counsel of the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations. Caroline has helped guide the Blockchain Institute along their very first steps as an organization. She has provided invaluable resources in the form of advice, material, and networking.

Shekhar Gupta

COO of Blockchain Initiatives

Shekhar Gupta serves as COO of Blockchain Initiatives in Kansas City, and is the founder of the Kansas City Government Blockchain Association chapter. He is currently assisting our organization with the development and teaching of our blockchain fundamentals and developer courses scheduled to begin Spring 2019.

KU Blockchain Institute Announces Industry Advisory Board was originally published in University of Kansas Blockchain Institute on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Setting: Lawrence, KS, Mid-November, 5:00 pm

It’s a few hours ’til tip-off for the first Men’s Kansas Basketball game of the season. Like clockwork, thousands of dedicated fans flock into the college town, bumper to bumper, on highways I-70 and K-10. Nobody likes traffic jams, and everyone wishes they had their own personal driving lane.

Blockchain developers and users feel the same way.

There are thousands of new-age web projects in development which plan to utilize the Ethereum blockchain, but the question remains if Ethereum can handle the network traffic of a thousand projects. In this installment of Blockchain Fundamentals, we explore the solutions in development to scale the public blockchain ecosystem

As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, improving a public blockchain’s frequency (block time) and capacity (TPS = block time x block size) is not the complete solution to achieving scalability for mass adoption. Before jumping into particular concepts, let’s first briefly expand on what is Ethereum and the scalability problem it faces.

The creation of Ethereum (2014) was a massive landmark of innovation for the cloud computing and blockchain space. The creation of Bitcoin (2009) brought the ability for parties to safely transact value without a trusted third party. Ethereum takes this same concept, and then applies it to traditional computer logic (If, then, else, execute command). Ethereum’s network is partially composed of a decentralized virtual machine that serves as a platform for developers to build decentralized applications, also known as dapps.

Unfortunately, Ethereum’s network performance is seriously constrained due to it Proof of Work consensus mechanism. It’s capacity cannot scale for mass adoption by everyday users and enterprises in its current form. To explain why, we will examine what happened when the first popular Ethereum dapp, CryptoKitties, launched on the network in late 2017.

CryptoKitties is an Ethereum dapp that lets users to breed digitally unique cats that can be traded and sold, like Pokemon cards. The game was an instant hit with Ethereum users. Transactions related to breeding/buying/selling digital cats accumulated for 25% of total network traffic as the dapp user count grew to 1.5 million by the end of March 2018.

This caused serious network congestion. When a network is operating at full capacity, unconfirmed transactions are pooled together in a “mem-pool”. A mem-pool is best described as a waiting room, and the size of the fee the user attaches to the transaction reflects their spot in line to get confirmed by miners. During the dapp’s peak usage, the mem-pool grew to 33,000 transactions while transactions fees soared as users competed to get their transactions confirmed. This real world event highlighted a serious problem with Ethereum’s current design where transactions, regardless of the dapp or type, are all given the same preferential treatment by miners.

Many projects are currently in development across the globe to solve this issue, whether it be altering the current design of Ethereum or launching a fully separate project and network. The developers of the Ark Ecosystem crafted a solution called “Smartbridge” to circumnavigate this scaling problem by giving each dapp the ability to have its own blockchain network that is interoperable with other networks. This concept of giving developers the ability to build their own blockchain for their specific dapp requires the introduction of some new terminology.

These terms are mainchain, sidechain, interoperability, and ecosystem.

Key Definitions

Mainchain: The blockchain that serves as the primary avenue for cross chain transactions between different sidechains.

Sidechain: A separate and custom tailored blockchain that runs parallel to the mainchain. It processes its own transactions natively, but remains connected to the mainchain in order to be interoperable with other sidechains.

• Also referred to as: “bridgechain” (Ark), “childchain” (Ardor), and many more

Interoperability: The ability for one blockchain to communicate with another blockchain, yet remain independent.

Ecosystem: A network of interoperable sidechains that can utilize each other’s functions.

To efficiently comprehend the following concepts, let’s first visually analyze how network traffic flows on Ethereum’s blockchain before explaining the design and utility of the Ark Ecosystem’s Smartbridge technology.

Visual Explained: Paying homage to the transportation analogy featured in the Part 1 of this series, this is a bird’s eye view of the Ethereum blockchain.

• Each cart = block of transactions
• Transaction color = type of transaction

Every transaction, regardless of it’s type, is utilizing the Ethereum blockchain. This design is the cause for the network congestion issues brought from the Cryptokitties dapp transactions.

Visual Explanation: Utilizing a bird’s eye view again, it’s easy to visualize how capacity can be increased utilizing sidechains that are interoperable with one another. Each dapp has been given its own blockchain to process transactions, significantly reducing the mainchain’s traffic. Utilizing Smartbridges, blockchains can utilize the features of one another, and this gives birth to a blockchain ecosystem — Hence the name “Ark Ecosystem”.

“But wait, I’m confused. Where are the smartbridges and mainchain?”

Visual Explanation: It’s better to visualize a blockchain ecosystem as sidechain layers stacked on top of one another. Between each sidechain layer resides the mainchain. Notice that the mainchain looks just like the current Ethereum blockchain in figure 1, filled with transactions from all different kinds of dapps/networks. Utilizing Smartbridges, each sidechain is interoperable with one another, and therefore benefits from the features of the other chains.

In order for a sidechain to utilize a Smartbridge, the sidechain runs two sets of nodes:

1. Nodes for native transactions on their network
2. Ark ACES nodes for transacting with between other sidechains

To learn more about ACES Nodes and the ACES Marketplace, click here.

To learn how trustless token swapping will be implemented, click here.

This completes Part 2 of Blockchain Fundamentals: featuring the Ark Ecosystem. There are still many more aspects of public blockchains that need to be covered such as consensus mechanisms, governance, and security. Those topics are better saved for another time. Part 3 is coming soon.

Blockchain Fundamentals: Scaling through Interoperability — featuring the Ark Ecosystem was originally published in University of Kansas Blockchain Institute on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Learning the fundamentals of public blockchains, such as those of Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrency networks, can be a daunting task due to the wide-ranging criteria by which they are designed. Similar to trains, planes, and automobiles, public blockchains are machines with many moving parts. Some mechanics appear more complex than others if not explained properly.

In this series, we fundamentally explain and conceptualize the qualities used to benchmark a public blockchain by analyzing their latency and capacity.

Speed — What is the network’s average latency rate (block time)?

Modern Society has grown accustomed to instantaneous communication, but it wasn’t always this way back when the internet was operated through phone lines. A strong comparison to the current state of Bitcoin or Ethereum network latency and capacity is the age of dial-up internet in the 1990s when webpage took minutes, instead of seconds to load.

Network latency also referred to as “block time”, is the time required to generate the next block of transactions in the chain. In other words, it is the amount of time a user has to wait, after pressing the “send” transaction button, to see their transaction appear on the blockchain.

Real World Physics:

Traditionally, most humans visualize data as a continuous flow — like the flow of a river in a physical world.

Question: “How much time does it take for this unique water molecule to move from point A to point B?”

Blockchain Physics:

The flow of data on a blockchain is much different. Flow is now periodical, not continuous. Periodical flow is better described as a refresh rate.

Question: “How frequently is the spreadsheet (digital ledger) refreshing/ updating itself?”

Capacity — How large is the network’s bandwidth?

Bandwidth = Transactions Per Second = TPS

The TPS equation has two constraints/variables:

1. Block size
2. Block time

How can we visualize blockchain network capacity in a real world setting?

Simple Analogy:

Imagine that you are sitting down in a chair next to a railroad track facing a moving freight train.

Blockchain = freight train

• Each block = freight car
• Block size = # of freight containers stacked per car
• Block time = speed of the train

Each time a freight car travels by you, a new block of transactions has been confirmed by the network. The developers, Proof of Work networks, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, are working everyday to engineer a solution to increase TPS in order to handle exponentially growing network traffic.

It’s important to remember that increasing TPS requires increasing the block size (Variable A) or decreasing block time (Variable B).

TPS = (block size) x (block time)

Block size is a relatively artificial constraint — similar to how a railroad company could choose to stack 5 freight containers (increase block size by 5x) on each car in order to move more goods. TPS would increase by 5x, but this can be just as impractical in a decentralized computing environment as it is shipping freight across country.

Anyone can copy Bitcoin’s open-source code, edit the block size to be a higher value, and then claim their new network has a higher capacity (TPS). Regardless, it will still take an average of ten minutes to interact with their blockchain.

Let’s visualize this!

Notice how ridiculous this looks! As it turns out, drastically increasing block size in a decentralized computing environment is just as impractical as stacking multiple containers on a train cart. Why?

• Larger blocks make full validator nodes more expensive to operate since they require more expensive equipment to process larger batches of data and store more memory.
• The more expensive a node is to operate the less people there are who can afford to run one
• Decentralization of the network is decreased, therefore security and immutability is decreased
• The fewer nodes there are, the fewer bookkeepers there are to manipulate and launch a 51% attack

How is blockchain performance improving?

Engineers in the 1800s were told by their bosses to form a solution to increase the amount of goods that could be sent on the railroad.

Solution: Increase the train’s speed!

By utilizing newer developed consensus mechanisms, Delegated Proof of Stake & Proof of Stake, developers now have the ability to host networks with incredibly faster block times. This decreases the dependence on block size to increase network capacity (TPS).

Interestingly, the physical equivalent of next gen DPoS and PoS networks are more akin to new age passenger transportation systems than freight trains.

Notice that a higher network capacity is achieved with a far smaller block size (150 vs 2020 trans). As mentioned above, block size is a relatively artificial constraint that can be increased if network traffic increases to an amount deeming it necessary.

Although latency has improved and TPS has increased, this is still not an end all solution for improving a network’s ability to scale for mass adoption. To get caught up on solutions used to scale public blockchains, read Blockchain Fundamentals: featuring the Ark Ecosystem — Part 2.

Blockchain Fundamentals: Latency & Capacity — Featuring the Ark Ecosystem was originally published in University of Kansas Blockchain Institute on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.