A modeled cryptocurrency after a dog meme proves once again that this is not a joke

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Created on a whim in 2013, dogecoin is not just always there, it plays a crucial role in the continuous testing of at least one "serious" technology. In fact, on February 5, he especially took into account an experience that successfully highlighted one of the most enterprising Ethereum projects.

On that date, the highly anticipated technology Truebit successfully sent the dogecoin to Rinkeby testnet of Ethereum, where he became a separate asset on this blockchain. A historic first, the transaction marked the end of a multi-year project that developers see as a stepping stone to the interoperability of crypto assets more broadly.

Nicknamed the "dogethereum bridge", the test also marks the first real output of truebit, which aims to solve one of the biggest problems of the ethereum: scalability.

In short, the intelligent contract platform can not stand a lot of users right now. Indeed, because of all the data that Ethereum has to store in its globally distributed database, it requires more than three times more data than Bitcoin, which makes the task more difficult for users.

Although truebit is less known than scaling solutions like raiden and sharding, the technology may be more ambitious because it is designed to scale any type of computation ethereum rather than just transactions. That's the key, since ethereum presents itself as more than just a financial cryptocurrency.

In the long run, truebit wants to scale video, machine learning or just about any calculation you can think of, and the dogethereum is the first case of 39, use, until now.

Jason Teutsch, co-founder of Truebit:

"We built a first version of what we call" truebit lite. "This demonstrates that all truebit masterpieces are working, it's a big step for us."

$ 1 million on the line

In retreating, the history of the dogethereum is interesting.

At the height of the dogecoin (at a time when his thriving community could raise $ 30,000 in donations to fund a bobsleigh team), Alex Van de Sande, designer of the Ethereum UX Foundation, launched with other developers with a way to move pieces of dogecoin to ethereum and back.

The group has locked the funds into a DAO, a kind of application that runs on ethereum, allowing money to be spent only once specific rules are met. In this case, the funds would only need to be released if five of the DAO leaders voted by signing an approval with their private keys ethereum

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Since the price of the ethereum has ballooned over the years, the smart contract now holds about $ 1.2 million. But no one has received the bonus so far, mainly because the effective management of the dogetereum has proven to be a much more difficult problem to solve than expected, as Van emphasized. of Sande in a series of tweets describing the origins of the project.

The heart of the problem is that it is too expensive in computer science to validate a coin that goes from one channel to another – and vice versa – that costs millions of dollars in ether. In order to solve this problem, it must be cheaper to perform calculations on the ether blockchain chain

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"This [bounty] initiated a two or three year discussion on the best way to implement it," said Sina Habibian, developer of Truebit, adding:

"Dogethereum is representative of a larger problem of how to make big calculations."

And dogethereum is behind the birth of Truebit – the seemingly ridiculous bridge that sparked the interest of Christian Reitwiessner, developer of the Ethereum Foundation, and Christian Reitwiessner's interest in the design of a layer of scalability on the ethereum.

The great test

The developers of Truebit may be getting closer to the pullout of the dogetereum bonus, as some successful tests on Rinkeby's copy of the ethereum chain have been executed.

The only other step is to do it live.

Truebit built a dogecoin thin client, a smaller version of the blockchain that removes most of the historical data, integrating it into the doge relay so that it could move the chain warp parts safely.

Yet, Truebit developers have emphasized the stimulating aspect of what they've accomplished, arguing that the dogethereum bridge is different from the decentralized exchange via atomic exchanges, an idea that has gained ground lately. On the contrary, it looks more like side chains, a long-lived Bitcoin technology.

"We really want to remove coins from the dogecoin chain and put them on ethereum in the form of ERC-20 chips," says Teutsch. "And be able to move them again."

"You do not need a counterpart, you do it completely by yourself," adds Habibian.

To do this, there must be a way to block the coins on the dogecoin so that they can not be spent before being returned from the ethereum. But this is not the hardest part. What remains expensive in calculation proves that the dogecoin owner owns the ether coins on the other side.

They then performed a transaction on the Rinkeby testnet, sending the dogecoin to ethereum – and again using truebit under the hood, so that normally expensive proof is executed off-line, in a way much less expensive.

No estimate.

Despite the public debut of the scaling up project, the team behind truebit still has some work to do.

In this first version of the technology, the incentives are "greatly simplified," says Habibian.

In the technology that they have today, some participants behave in an "altruistic" manner. In other words, system verifiers do expensive calculations just to be nice.

And although it probably would not work in practice, the goal of truebit is to one day create a market where participants are paid to do computational work on their computers and contribute to correct results.

"People will go out of their own interests to run these calculations and earn money back," Habibian said.

So, when will all this be ready exactly? Habibian would not give an estimate of the time it will take to actually launch on ethereum.

"It is always difficult to make estimates like this because one of the rules of software engineering is:" As long as you think something is going to take, it will take three times longer " .

Still, he revealed Truebit's plans to publish new software programs iterating on this milestone in the coming months, now that the startup has teamed up with the start of the Aragon decentralization and ethereum LivePeer-based video service. .

It is so that they think that technology will spread early, beyond the dogetheric, marking a big step for truebit – and potentially etheric as well.

As Habibian told CoinDesk:

"When it is done and that it is fully built, you can run any computation on ethereum."

Picture of Dogethereum via dogecoin subreddit

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