Monet is coming soon

Welcome to the Monet Medium! In this blog we will share the project’s development updates, roadmap, industry insights, as well as our responses to potential challenges, thoughts and opportunities that our project may face as it grows.

Let’s start from the beginning

We are excited to announce our project — Monet. We’ll be soon releasing the first draft of the whitepaper for the community review.

Monet is a public network architecture for mobile blockchains on demand. It is an open-source infrastructure that enables groups of people involved in any task or activity to form temporary networks with their mobile devices, and coordinate themselves without trusted third parties as intermediaries.

Ok, but why?

Nowadays, we engage in sharing economy in accordance with many aspects of our everyday life: transportation, housing, space rental, delivery, learning, personal services, etc.

The peer-to-peer economy that we know relies almost exclusively on trusted third parties that act as a central authority, and make interaction possible. That means users get convenience in exchange for privacy, transparency and control over their data and computations.

Distributed public ledgers, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, attempted to solve this problem by removing a centralized intermediary from the equation. Existing public ledgers, however, are too cumbersome to run on mobile, where most of the shared economy takes place.

Monet allows participants to directly engage with each other in a truly decentralized manner via ad hoc, temporary mobile-blockchains. Monet’s architecture and novel consensus mechanism provides the network with properties suitable for mobile deployments: speed, asynchronicity and high throughput.

Monet is a public network architecture, which means that anyone can initiate a temporary mobile network. Following temporary collaboration, participants are not required to stay online to support other users. This is a major departure from the concept of existing immutable public blockchains, where a great deal of effort is devoted to incentivize nodes to remain connected and process other people’s commands.

Users that form a community around a certain activity or market — living predominantly on mobile — can join a mobile network to interact with each other in a decentralized manner. Once the activity is finished, the mobile network terminates. Even though the network itself is ephemeral, the information about the transactions that occurred during the life of such network is persisted and immutable; blockchains record a provable history of the transactions that took place within them. Inter-Blockchain Communication is what allows blockchains to transact outside of their closed circles by proving on one chain that a transaction happened on another chain. Hence, groups of people can withdraw information from a main ledger into a temporary ad hoc blockchain, transact among themselves in isolation and later return to the main ledger.

What’s under the hood of Monet?

Monet consists of multiple ephemeral blockchains that users dynamically create with their mobile devices. Such functionality is possible due to the usage of Babble: a pluggable consensus mechanism suitable for mobile deployments, and Monet Hub: an always-on blockchain that supports the ecosystem and provides optional infrastructure services for the first applications on the network.

Babble is a consensus mechanism that ensures all participants process the same commands in the same order. It uses an enhanced gossip protocol to record the history of gossip itself, in a DAG, from which it continuously computes the agents’ eventual common knowledge, and projects a deterministically ordered list of events onto a blockchain. The advantage of the protocol is in instant finality, low latency, high throughput, asynchrony, leaderlessness and low message complexity. The blockchain design facilitates auditability and enables interoperability via Inter-Blockchain Communication protocols.

Monet Network Ecosystem

In one of the upcoming Medium posts, we will discuss the project ecosystem in greater detail.

How we came up with the idea?

As kids, the Monet co-founders — Martin and Giacomo — both developed a keen interest in Math and Finance, and both studied Financial Mathematics in graduate school. A major financial crisis was the moment when Martin and Giacomo became disappointed in the conventional financial system and started looking for alternative approaches to building such financial systems. In early 2011 they already had ideas about decentralized payments, and after they first encountered Satoshi’s bitcoin paper, blockchain technology was the answer they were looking for.

The co-founders built an online bitcoin wallet to try themselves in the industry. They soon realized that upholding the principles of decentralization was more important to them than simply implementing blockchain in a solution. When their first bitcoin startup essentially became a centralized platform, they decided to shut it down.

Since then, Martin took on a number of tech endeavours and Giacomo broadened his experience in the Venture Capital and business world. The ideas of decentralization compelled them to continue looking for distributed solutions that advance blockchain to new levels. They studied various protocols and how different teams were innovating around the ideas of consensus. Their frustration working with existing codebases stemmed from the difficulty to separate the logically distinct components. Thus, the idea of Babble consensus architecture was born; it needed to be simple, modular and pluggable. It was named Babble, a synonym to gossip, since it was based on the gossip protocol and the logo with a magpie bird from the famous Monet painting is a symbol of spreading a gossip.

Babble was the first product in a suite of products to come. The team united all R&D efforts under the umbrella of Mosaic Networks, which ironically had Mo-Net, the name of the painter behind the original magpie painting that originally inspired Babble.

As blockchain was showing its multiple potential applications in different aspects of economy, they saw how existing solutions were lacking the flexibility needed for the implementation that suits our modern lives: on mobile. The properties of Babble fit perfectly for mobile deployments. Hence Monet, the public network powered by Babble, came to be.

In January 2017, the co-founders joined forces to work full-time on the idea and introduced Monet, a public network for mobile blockchains on demand.

We’ll release the details about the token generation event in the upcoming weeks.

When MVP?

Our current goal is by the middle of June 2018, to have a stable release of the Babble consensus. The version will include a blockchain interface and mobile SDK. Stay tuned for more details.

In the meantime

Join us here:

See updates on the Monet website: Monet.network

Follow our official updates via Twitter: @MonetNetwork

Let’s chat on Telegram: https://t.me/MonetNetwork

We welcome any and all ideas and feedback from the community, and are open to collaboration!