Overledger Network Community Treasury Design Release Quant Follow Mar 31 · 2 min read

In 2019, Quant Network released a whitepaper [1] introducing the Overledger Network, which will allow enterprise and distributed ledger community stakeholders to access and participate in a multi-ledger global distributed network. The Overledger Network will be made up of gateways that link to various technologies, such as permissioned and permissionless distributed ledgers, as well as legacy systems. The Overledger Network is therefore set to solve the challenges of enterprises and distributed ledger communities operating in silos. Enterprises will be able to host their own secure dedicated gateways, resulting in access to new markets and new users across many different distributed ledgers, without compromising their corporate security policies and regulatory requirements. Community members will also be able to host a gateway, and therefore take an active part in the first public distributed ledger interoperability project that does not introduce another blockchain.

The next milestone for the community portion of the Overledger Network roadmap is the design of the community treasury. The community treasury’s role is to handle QNT payments flowing from users to the gateways in such a way as to foster a growing ecosystem and disincentivise bad or malicious behaviour from any user or gateway, and to do so in a manner where it can be held accountable to any observer. The underlying Treasury smart contracts are currently undergoing final testing to deploy shortly.

With this milestone in mind, today we release our first public version of the Overledger Network’s Community Treasury Design whitepaper, which you can find at [2]. This paper:

(i) describes aspects of the Overledger Network;

(ii) discusses the community treasury’s role in handling payments between users and gateways using layer 2 unidirectional payment channels; and

(iii) details how the community treasury enforces rules between the users and gateways, known as payment contracts, which dis-incentivises bad behaviour using a game-theoretic model.

Using payment channels will allow QNT transfers between users and gateways flowing through the community treasury to be quick, significantly reduce their Ether fees and be publicly verifiable upon channel settlement. Additionally, the implementation of these payment contracts will be a breakthrough for the distributed ledger domain. With payment contracts, users not running a distributed ledger node can ask multiple gateways to perform a request where the responses will be compared for verification purposes. Therefore, not only do distributed ledger networks provide a method to establish trust between different parties running different nodes, but the Overledger Network will provide a method to establish trust between users not running a node and parties running nodes.

We’re looking forward to seeing the growth of the ecosystem and the full potential of the Network of Networks that brokers trust between all participants and networks.