Insider release | Merculet accelerates enterprises’ organic growth through innovative n-tier architecture!

By Shenjun Zhang (CTO of Merculet)

The vision

Merculet positions itself the Chief Growth Officer (CGO) of Global Entrepreneurs. By providing ready-to-use one-stop solutions, Merculet helps Internet companies embrace the innovative token-based operations. Without prior knowledge of the blockchain, companies can start their tokenized operations within one day with just a few single configuration parameters. Using this trust-free blockchain system, each company would be linked and integrated with its peers within the same blockchain ecosystem.

Merculet wants to initiate from the attention economy and provide guidance to Internet companies and Internet users to this new era of the Internet: Internet of Value. Merculet intends to blossom the next generation of the Internet.

Multi-tier Architecture with Multi-Chain and Multi-Asset

After a significant amount of thinking and testing, Merculet team concludes that multi-tier architecture with multi-chain and multi-asset is one of very few architectures that can meet the current SLA needs of numerous Internet companies and Internet and also has good extensibility for future product development. Merculet aims at serving thousands of Internet companies in the future, providing them with a one-stop growth solution based on the tokenized operation and bring all of them to this blockchain era.

Above is our architecture diagram, and here are the details of each tier:

1. Tier 3, Off Chain, the solution tier for Merculet SAAS solution: when we open up the interface to Internet Asset Tier, third-party platforms, and apps that are adapted would reside in this tier. The solution to millions of Internet companies and Internet users is linked to this tier. This tier can reach a TPS of more than 100,000/s.

2. Tier 2, Permissioned Chain, the Internet Asset Tier: this tier is in charge of the generation of UAT and UAV: (a) the circulation of UAT within a company’s ecological closed loop, and (b) the execution of smart contracts customized by our partners. According to the specific situations of different nodes, the TPS is around 300–1000/s.

3. Tier 1, Public Chain, the Native Asset Tier: this tier is in charge of anchoring and circulation of UAT for the cryptocurrency, no matter the cryptocurrency is the public ledger facing MVP token, or other tokens that Merculet’s partners will issue on the public blockchain in the future. Currently, the tokens were released based on Ethereum ERC20, and the TPS depends on the TPS of other public blockchains.

The above explanation is a simple version that we use to describe the architecture of Merculet. In fact, as a ready-to-use one-stop solution that helps thousands of companies, the actual complexity of our architecture is beyond what is shown here at this table. Some features are not shown here, including the anti-fraud system, the adaptor to integrate with other public blockchains, the content creation platform, and the open-data platform.

Why we start with an hybrid chain solution instead of improving the public blockchain

Improving the public blockchain is a long-term process

Current public blockchains all have rooms for improvement to scale up to accommodate large-scale applications. In order to introduce large-scale applications to the improved public blockchains, it is necessary to go through an incredibly tedious process from prototype, testing, on-line operation testing, stabilization, to produce an upgrade. This is the reason that it often takes many years for this kind of projects to exert a large-scale impact through applications.

The enterprise-level demand could not wait

In the post-mobile Internet era, there is a lack of effective growth strategies. An excessive amount of money is spent on marketing channels while users attracted are irrelevant. Big companies like Facebook and Google monopolize users’ attention for occupation. All entrepreneurs nowadays anxiously need a brand-new growth method. Meanwhile, the latest progress and discussions about blockchain technology make entrepreneurs nervous because they do not want to be left out in this blockchain era.

On the Internet users’ side, they finally start to realize what they actually want from the Internet companies: real customized user experience; data control; protection of their privacy; and better engagement with products that they like.

The token-based operation will bring a creative solution to both Internet companies’ problems and Internet users’ problems. It will help companies embrace blockchain and realize organic growth, and it will help users pursue real value and trust. However, companies face a large number of product and technology obstacles when implementing tokenized operations. Our mission to help them solve this issue.

Currently, public blockchains could not meet the need of sizable enterprise level applications, and public blockchains are not currently designed to meet such demand.

MVP, the native asset of Merculet is designed to provide an open circulation mechanism that everyone can participate in, other than the closed loop ecosystem that individual companies create to implement tokenized operations. This kind of circulation mechanisms needs to be built on a trustworthy infrastructure that everyone can participate, which is a public blockchain. We choose Ethereum as the basic platform for MVP.

However, MVP is only a part of our tokenize operation solution and open platform. It is not the entire story. Merculet as a one-stop solution and an open platform will solve all the obstacles that companies might encounter when implementing the tokenized operation. For example, Merculet will help companies carry out User Attention Value system, help companies issue User Attention Token and build up the trust system among companies so that they can collaborate with each other effectively and efficiently.

However, even though this company-level system needs to be built on trustworthy infrastructure too, it doesn’t require every Internet user to participate, and each company has its unique requirements. So, in a nutshell, we are building smaller ecosystems that are inside the big ecosystem. Each company has its own User Attention Value system, and each ecosystem has its own token and circulation mechanism, small ecosystems collaborate with each other. The public blockchain designed from the perspective of social economics has different purposes. The basic trustworthy bases we need for the companies are:

1. Permissioned peer node: Our model is based on a majority participation and trustiness. Actually, if everyone participates, there will be significant tradeoffs, such as performance and the way to reach consensus.

2. The value between the nodes could focus on the business itself rather than miner’s rewards or transaction expenses. Most of the companies want to do frequent transactions in small amounts. They cannot accept variable or unpredictable infrastructure costs.

3.The business itself should be a multi-centered based on different small ecosystems, and it will not be an entirely decentralized environment where everyone can participate. The access to the record-keeping service can be stratified by small ecosystems.

4. When facing numerous Internet users, there is a need to provide high throughput and low latency experience. Business services need to have SLA(Sevice Level Agreement) protection.

Public blockchains cannot meet the above demands. The first three demands and the original intention of public blockchains have contradictions because public blockchains must ensure there is sufficient democracy in as many nodes as possible. Ideally, the consensus in the distributed environment is deterministic Byzantine fault tolerance, like PBFT(Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance), but PBFT is not infeasible under the condition that everyone can participate because, under the condition of PBFT, each node must communicate with all nodes to complete the decision. This is not realistic in the entire network environment. Therefore, most public blockchains choose non-deterministic Byzantine fault tolerance algorithms such as POW and POS. Non-deterministic Byzantine fault tolerance requires a set of economic incentive models for nodes to make the benefits of honesty more significant than the benefits of fraud. Therefore, the basis of the continuous operation of public blockchains is to provide transaction services with the cost of infrastructure services (nodes) and the existence of miners’ rewards. Besides, because everyone can participate, the access to the ledger of public blockchains must be flat.

The Architecture of Merculet

Merculet adopts a hybrid architecture that uses both public blockchains and permissioned blockchains. It cannot only meet companies’ demand for stability and scalability but also meet users’ demand for freedom and security. It is allowing the entire solution to serve companies and individuals of the entire mobile Internet at the fastest speed while maintaining the possibility of upgrading the overall architecture in the future.

Based on Fabric of Hyperledger, Merculet builds a permissioned blockchain as its Internet Asset Tier. This tier is responsible for recording UAV and circulating UAT within a closed loop ecosystem. Consortium blockchain is a permissioned node in nature, only relevant members of a particular small ecosystem are beneficiaries, and they are the only ones would serve as contributing nodes. Since it is not a full-net environment and the nodes are limited, a consensus algorithm that satisfies deterministic Byzantine fault tolerance can be truly realized on a scalable level. In the case of a credit node, even CFT can be used instead of non-Byzantine. Fault-tolerant consensus algorithm, by doing so, consensus throughput capabilities can be improved. Under this circumstance, there are no economic methods like transaction fee or minor rewards are necessary to ensure the honesty of nodes. Consortium blockchains like Fabric have the concept of Channel to define the data sharing channel and can implement the permissioned access to the ledger data. In the context of granting assess to different nodes, right now, the TPS of Merculet’s Internet Asset Tier is in between 300–100/s. Even this TPS still could not meet the needs of numerous Internet users. As an open platform, circulation of the asset is only a part of the solution, and there are many other problems companies need to face, like an open API for accessing a large number of Internet users, a management interface for setting UAV rules, an open platform account system for companies and users. Therefore, Merculet has set up a classic Internet access tier on top of the Internet Asset tier to provide technology access services that can meet the SLA needs of different companies, and the TPS is guaranteed up to be at least 100,000/s.

The three-tier architecture, from top to bottom is centralized classic big data tier, multi-tier consortium tier, and complete decentralized public blockchain tier. People might have the concern that this architecture is not complete decentralized for end users. We need to emphasize here that for end users, all they need is trust, instead of complete decentralization. In different circulation systems of assets, the demand for trust is also different: in Native Asset tier while users would trade MVP on public blockchains, end users need an open and trustworthy environment while everyone can participate. When it comes to UAV and UAT, end users need a trustworthy environment that is related to the circulation of a specific asset. It is acceptable to users when companies change the assessment rules of UAV and the issuance rules of UAT, as long as these changes are recorded in the form of public ledger, and there is a reasonable explanation about each change. In the future, Merculet will release the ledger of the consortium blockchain and provide tracking services like Etherscan is currently offering, to ensure every transaction of assets is traceable. At the top tier, the SAAS open platform, we plan on making it open source depends on actual operations, and we will provide the interface to Internet Asset Tier based on consortium blockchain for Dapp usage.

About open source

Merculet is not a public blockchain project. Instead, it is a one-stop solution. We don’t plan to open source all the code from the beginning, we plan to release our code gradually according to the operation of our ecosystem. But our original intention is and will always be to provide the best service to our ecosystem and reduce users’ reliance on Merculet. The prosperity of an ecosystem depends on the trust and contribution of its participants. At this stage, our focus is to have this ecosystem up running as soon as possible. 2018 is a year that we will try our best to roll up the speed, and this is why we wrote in our While Paper that starting from next year, we will begin to “De-Merculet-lization”.

Below is a preliminary roadmap of our open source plan:

1. UAV data monitoring SDK 2. Nodes of the consortium blockchain at Internet Asset Tier

In the week of April 16, we will release a demo and open source some code and will release more open source code in May and June. Our database in GitHub is ready, so please follow us there.

About the development progress

People ask why Merculet, as a new project, is so aggressive when it comes to development speed. Here are some reasons:

1. Accumulated technical knowledge. In past years, the whole team has been working on providing growth solutions to companies. The team has gained a significant amount of experience developing technology and operating platforms. The “Deeplink” solution that the team has developed is serving more than thirty million individual users every day, and its B2B smart content distribution platform pulls off billions of exposures per day. The past success would contribute to the development of the Merculet project.

2. An outstanding team. Around 30 people are working on Merculet project fulltime. We are also recruiting another 50 technical positions. Although some members are still adjusting to the whole project, a large number of good things are happening.

3. User first. Instead of focusing on creating a new public blockchain, we consider our users’ needs first and focus on how to provide a one-stop solution and our can our users implement this solution.

4. Excellent partners. The company and CEO Ivan Jiang himself have both built up a plethora of partners in past years, and these partners will all play an essential role in building the Internet of Value.

A lot of customers are running black box docking test (some processes are not automated and interfaced yet), and we believe that with the release of first unattended-GA, and launch of observable online products and the disclosure of performance data, more and more companies will join with this amazing product.

About the future

The development of blockchain technology is still at early-stage, no matter is a public blockchain or a consortium blockchain. There is a clear boundary among different groups and different people’s interests. At the same time, blockchain technology and blockchain community both evolve remarkably fast. Merculet always work closely with many development teams that focus on underlying blockchains, Merculet keeps a close eye on the latest blockchain technology, continuously strengthens the capacity of blockchain and updates our platform architecture. We will perform an internal test on our latest architecture and integrate our company users seamlessly when we believe the latest architecture is stable enough.

Blockchain world is charming, and the nature of blockchain technology can support the widest imaginations in the real world. It may take years to make the blockchain world mature. Merculet would like to invite people who believe in blockchain technology, who respect customer experiences to join us and let us create value for our users using the most proper technology together.

The End

I would like to share this captivating piece of information with you; I came across this when I was reading the news lately. The founder of Ethereum, Vitalik also has similar multi-tier architecture. When Vtalike replied EOS’S BM, he mentioned:

“If you have an application which really requires very fast transaction confirmations, and for such fast confirmations to happen reliably, then IMO the correct domain in which to build such systems is level-2 platforms on top of secure base-layer platforms like Ethereum. The level-2 platforms can be built in such a way that they depend on the second level for performance, but not safety (see: state channel hubs, Plasma operators). They can then have the incentive of reputation and expected future revenue to drive them to perform well in the present, and the negative costs of any failure are mitigated. I actually think DPOS as a consensus algo for Plasma chains and state channel hubs (and systems like Loom) could work reasonably well; the ability for any user to easily fall back to the base chain and switch to another chain provider serves as an important check limiting the downside potential of any malicious layer-2 chain operator or cartel trying to cause harm..” (Source:https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/thanks-for-replying-d8ea7683246c)

We are convinced that more people will realize the importance of blockchain technology, which will serve the entire society in a more efficient way. We also welcome more people to join us to innovate in this new era. If you like Merculet and believe what we are doing, don’t hesitate to connect with us at: contact@merculet.io.