PolySwarm Beta Release: A Sneak Peek of What’s Coming

We just released Alpha and there’s a lot more where that came from. Beta will be released on May 31, 2018. Check out what the team has been working on.

The PolySwarm team is hard at work on PolySwarm Beta — coming at the end of this month! In this post, we’re giving you a sneak peak into what we’re working on and where we’re at as we prepare for the Beta release.

Scaling

From CTO, Paul Makowski

PolySwarm will need to support a large number of artifacts scanned per day. We’re targeting 100,000 artifacts / day by the end the of the year. That’s a lot. Transactions to support this volume would rival CryptoKitties.

Needless to say, we need to get creative.Recall that PolySwarm supports two types of interactions:

Bounties: Wild West, free-for-all crowdsourced wisdom. Learn more about our bounty process: PolySwarm’s Bounty Lifecycle.

Offers (new in Beta): High throughput, low latency direct exchanges between Ambassadors and Experts

Each type demands its own scaling solution.

For Bounties, we’re building a PoA* sidechain that will allow participants to place Bounties without incurring Ethereum mainnet transaction fees and delays. polyswarm-relay will make this transparent to the developer.

polyswarm-gui (previously bounty-management) will make this easy for the end user.

This sidechain is a stopgap solution — using a Proof of Authority chain demands trust in the Authorities (currently: us). This is bad — we don’t want you to have to trust us. This stopgap will be in place to allow us to onboard more security experts during development phases. Anything PoA will be phased out before Stable, hopefully even before Gamma — plenty more to announce on this front!

As far as scaling Offers, for Beta we’re currently building on the ideas behind Raiden (but not the code) to implement simple state channels. For Gamma, we’re targeting counterfactual state channels — very exciting tech that we’ll be discussing in a future post.

Ground Truth Determination

From Chief Economist, Evelyn Hytopoulos

We have been working hard to design a ground truth voting model that will make sure arbiters’ incentives are constantly in line with the trustworthiness of the marketplace.

The ground truth, arrived at by arbiters, is what determines which security experts are paid for their assertion on any particular artifact, so it is really important that the voting process is not perverted by collusion or guessing.

To achieve this, we are developing a Proof of Stake model for the ground truth voting process. There will be a minimum stake to quality and a maximum stake to ensure that no one arbiter can overrun control of the market. At the artifact level, tokens will be allocated to arbiters to remunerate them for voting using a weighted random selection process.

We’ll be writing a whole blog post to dive deeper into this process along with the arbiter selection model, so stay tuned for more! In the mean time, don’t forget to sign up for our Weekly Security Experts Newsletter to be the first to hear about updates and opportunities to get involved!