Two weeks after the company’s announcement of its decentralized Social Media platform moving into alpha, Synereo discloses the underlying Technology Stack, enabling its Social Network to function without centralized servers – which are normally required for the processing of network activity and the storage of user information.

The newly announced technology combines significant improvements on existing decentralized technologies with developments unique to Synereo – providing for the first time scalable decentralized computation abilities on an industrial scale. Starting from Q4/2017, it will be possible to deploy fully operational applications on the system, without them having to be stored in a centralized location, effectively revolutionizing the way the internet works.

Synereo’s recently announced fundraising campaign is intended to fund the refinement of its Tech Stack, as well as to push forward the development of best-of-breed developer tools. Synereo’s existing technology already allows fully decentralized and distributed applications to be created – its social network is one such application, and Synereo’s other partners are using it as well – and with the next release planned for next year, Synereo’s architecture will become mature enough to match high-end industry requirements and be competitive with centralized computing platforms.

Synereo has recently announced a sizeable grant project, inviting developers and entrepreneurs to develop decentralized applications for its platform, to foster the development of a decentralized ecosystem, competing with the current centralized paradigm.

Synereo’s next version of its Tech Stack, to be released in 2017/Q4, will be composed of 4 layers, built on top of each other, as depicted in the picture below.

Blockchain 2.0, or RChain:

The first layer, called RChain, often referred to as “Blockchain 2.0”, constitutes a significant improvement on standard Blockchain technology underlying projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

A Blockchain is a distributed ledger, or form of decentralized Database, which records the state of a system on a series of devices maintaining the network (called nodes), rather than on a central server. The pioneers of Bitcoin invented the technology in order to track Bitcoin transactions. The Ethereum project further developed it in order to equip it with the ability to perform more sophisticated transactions, and essentially serve as a decentralized computer.

However, in contrast to those projects, Synereo’s RChain is a concurrent and sharded blockchain. “Sharded” refers to the subdivision of the Blockchain into composable parts, which interlock to a unified whole, but do not need to be computed all at once (as it is the case with the Bitcoin Blockchain). Concurrent means that this subdivision enables different processes to run in parallel without interfering with each other.

As a result of this architecture, RChain solves a well known problem of classical Blockchains, troubling the entire industry for years , while enabling Blockchain based systems to be much faster, infinitely scalable and cheaper to maintain. Find more information about RChain here.

Storage & Content Delivery or SpecialK:

While the blockchain records the overall state of the system — meaning the validity of transactions and the execution of smart contracts — it is not suited for the storage of heavy media data such as images, videos and text. For this purpose, Synereo’s CTO, Greg Meredith, developed a unique protocol to distribute this kind of information among Synereo nodes and then retrieve it on demand.

This protocol, SpecialK, has been under active development for over five years and constitutes an innovative approach to distributed storage technology. Representing an evolution of DHT-like distributed key-value databases. SpecialK also provides a monadic domain-specific language, providing programmers with a familiar, unified API where they can access data distributed across the network. Data is distributed with both redundancy and sensitivity in mind, making sure it’s available where it’s needed, when it’s needed, and concealed when it’s not.

Rholang Smart Contract Language or Synereo’s Programming Language for Decentralized Applications:

Rholang stands for Reflective, Higher-Order process Language, and is RChain’s native smart-contract language (or programming language), comparable to Ethereum’s Solidity. In contrast to Solidity, however, Rholang is a reflective programming language, based on process calculus, allowing for the parallel execution of processes and the composition of higher-ordered smart contracts on the basis of lower ones, in an efficient and secure way.

This grants Rholang an obvious advantage over traditional smart contract languages and blockchain scripts, and puts it in the same category with established programming languages. Java, C#, and Scala, have all eventually adopted reflection as a core feature. This is what allows programmers to use programs to write other programs, on which more complex applications can be deployed. Without this feature, industrial scale development would likely be impossible due to complexity.

The architecture also allows for better safety tests and simulations based on formal verification, a property of utmost importance when it comes to publicly used decentralized applications. The infamous DAO hack, for example, could have been avoided if the DAO’s code had been based on Rholang.

About Synereo:

Synereo is a Tel-Aviv based company which develops a decentralized tech stack, allowing web applications to exist without centralized servers. For more information about Synereo’s complete decentralized Tech Stack, please view this architecture document or visit their web site.