Like people, stars are born, they grow old and they die. Their birthplaces are huge, cold clouds of gas and dust, known as ‘nebulas’.

Hi guys! This post is brought to you by crypthousiasts Royalasgard & Maartendq!

How did we end up in the blockchain world?

Royalasgard:

The first time I got in touch with blockchain was when I discovered bitcoin back in 2015 when it was trading around 300 to 400 dollars. I liked the concept but didn’t give the underlying technology much attention. A year later when it was trading around 800$, I started looking more deeply in bitcoin and the technology and this adventure led me to a whole new world, the “altcoins”. I started setting up a monero node, but this proved to be difficult as I’m not really a tech savvy person. I had to check all these guides on reddit or youtube and that’s where I started to find people who shared the same passion for blockchain.. After a while we started to build a small community of like minded friends from Belgium and that’s where I got in touch with my fellow author, maartendq, who’s more tech savvy as he’s working in IT and familiar with linux. He started taking baby-steps in crypto during summer of ’17 and has become as addicted to crypto as I am.

How did we find Nebulas?

Royalasgard:

Some of the things I like to do once in a while, is checking coinmarketcap for recently added coins. One day Nebulas popped up in that list. Read the white paper, did some research and saw a great potential. I think we can all agree that all the bitcoin forking isn’t really healthy for the ecosystem and Nebulas provided a solution for that! In my eyes the search engine for blockchain with Nebulas Rank was a brilliant idea. So i sent the white paper to my buddy maartendq and asked his opinion. We started to discuss the whitepaper and came to the conclusion this is one of the rare projects with a great potential. Investments were made :)!

What is Nebulas and why do we like it?

Maartendq:

If you search for nebulas on youtube, most of the reviews talk about Nebulas Rank and everyone likes to call it the “Google of the blockchain”. Nebulas Rank aims to provide a fair ranking of addresses, dapps or smart contracts for blockchain users based on 3 things ; liquidity, propagation and interoperability. You can compare it with Google’s Pagerank, hence why it’s called the google of blockchain. NR has a huge commercial potential and can be used in search, recommendation, advertising and other fields.

But Nebulas is so much more in my opinion. I think we can all agree that we don’t like the forks who cause a split in the blockchain. Well, Nebulas Force aims to make that obsolete by making the protocol and smart contracts flexible and upgradeable. Advantages here are that parameters like POD incentive amount or consensus algorithm can be changed during development, but it will also allow developers to respond more rapidly to bugs.

There’s even more cool stuff. Nebulas will use Developer Incentive Program (DIP) to create a solid community and reward people that create great smart contracts or nice dapps. Rewards will be based on NR combined with WAU (Weekly Active Users).

As for its consensus algorithm, Nebulas is not using the traditional PoW or PoS, but came up with Proof of Devotion (POD). Generation of new blocks will be done by bookkeeping nodes. These “bookkeepers” will be the accounts with a very high Nebulas Rank (a lot of the Nebulas ecosystem is built on Nebulas Rank) combined off course with a yet to be defined amount of Nebulas as deposit.

Last but not least is the Search Engine (the whole reason why people keep comparing it to Google). By using crawlers, extractors and other tools to search, fetch and index data from their blockchain. Users will then be able to search in that data to look for some cool DApp.

Analyzing github/slack

Maartendq:

Being a sysadmin myself and having (re)viewed quite a lot of github projects in- and outside crypto, it’s not that hard to see if a project is well maintained and making good progress.

Some impressions after reviewing github:

Multiple daily commits showing great development activity and progress

Actively following up pull requests and merging them

Actively following up issues, reviewing them and providing fixes

Team of 4 full-time developers contributing to the project

Documentation is OK, but not awesome. Considering the fact that most likely all resources are going to development, this is normal. (Already did a small contribution on the wiki and pull requests got merged smoothly)

Some impressions on slack activity:

Core developers are reachable at slack and can help / assist you with issues

Community on slack still needs to grow

Devs are responding slowly ( but they are responding :) ), probably because they’re focusing on coding (understandable).

Running my own testnode

maartendq

As Nebulas is a large percentage in our portfolio, we are off course interested in running our own bookkeeper nodes and be an active part of the Nebulas community. After some unsuccessful attempts, I got my testnode running with their latest release, version 0.6.0.

Here you can see a successful transaction between 2 addresses created on testnet (I’m using the javascript console for this):

Note that when I first fetched the accountstate after the transaction, I was a bit too fast and the transaction did not propagate yet. The accountstates after that showed that my transaction was successful.

At github you can find a couple of tutorials that will get you started with the nebulas nodes and where developers, that want to start working with Nebulas, can take a first dive into Nebulas

Cool facts

Maartendq:

Ethereum smart contract fully compatible with it, so that Ethereum-based applications can run on Nebulas with zero migration cost (v1.0 will focus on the stability & security, JS/TS/Web-assembly are the languages supported, but solidity will later follow)

Testnet is currently up and running, mainnet is planned for March, this will also let everyone swap their ERC20 tokens to mainnet tokens

Example of protocol upgrade / no forking:

If protocol code needs to be upgraded, Nebulas development team will open discussion and voting (smart contract or forum) in communities. If the majority agrees to upgrade the protocol, development will pack the code in a special Protocol Code transaction and push this to all nodes in the whole network. This type of blockchain protocol upgrade is transparent for clients without hard — or soft fork

If protocol code needs to be upgraded, Nebulas development team will open discussion and voting (smart contract or forum) in communities. If the majority agrees to upgrade the protocol, development will pack the code in a special Protocol Code transaction and push this to all nodes in the whole network. This type of blockchain protocol upgrade is transparent for clients without hard — or soft fork Really like the fact they’ve already put a lot of thought in anti-cheating measures for NR and DIP (see whitepaper)

51% attack in POD is more difficult to perform compared to PoW / PoS, because you need 51% of the validators and that means highly reputed users (Top Nebulas Rank) + Nebulas deposit

Nebulas will provide a DNS-service. With DNS you will be able to give user friendly names to your account. Eg. : 0xdf4d22611412132d3e9bd322f82e2940674ec1bc03b20e40 can be called royalasgardlambotime.be

You will then be able to send transactions to “royalasgardlambotime.be” and sponsor his lambo!

You will then be able to send transactions to “royalasgardlambotime.be” and sponsor his lambo! Nebulas will implement lightning network! YaY!

Thanks for reading this and we hope you’ll love this project as much as we do!

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