Original 2018–04–12

(Please note: This is an English translation of a Chinese article written by Blue Fox).

Now most public chains will mention that the problem of tps development is the problem of the blockchain. This is also because the traditional blockchain has the problem of poor performance. In order to reach consensus, the efficiency is sacrificed. But if you want to build an ecosystem of countless DAPPs based on the public chain, there is no guarantee of performance that is almost impossible.

The dream of building a DAPP ecosystem is that Bitcoin has not been completed and it is not necessary to complete it. Bitcoin is only a digital currency and it has initially fulfilled its historical mission. It has become a value storer, and it has opened the world of the blockchain.

Ethereum started with the goal of building a world-wide computer that provided the infrastructure for building decentralized applications, but so far it has only succeeded in the crowdfunding field. Due to performance, cost, scalability, and other issues, it is not yet possible to become a DAPP infrastructure. By the end of 2017, a simple encrypted cat game would have caused Ethereum to be jammed. Ethereum tried to get rid of the predicament through techniques such as fragmentation, Plasma, and PoS consensus.

Newcomers, such as EOS, are highlighting their high performance, emphasizing the possibility of reaching mega-level tps. Then, in the future, an infrastructure is needed to build a prosperous DAPP ecosystem on this decentralized infrastructure to meet the user or business needs of various scenarios.

What kind of program is a better choice? This is what blue fox has been paying attention to. Blue Fox focuses on an HPB blockchain project that uses a completely different search path than other public chains or infrastructure. This path is worth paying attention to all the buddies who pay attention to the blockchain.

This path is a combination of hardware and software. It is more demanding and the practice is more difficult. However, if it is truly grounded, it may be a good path.

HPB to become a high-performance blockchain infrastructure

Whether HPB or EOS have the same goals, they must provide a high-performance infrastructure for the decentralized ecosystem. Why? Mainly from the blockchain to the mainstream business scene point of view. The current blockchain has achieved some success in security and decentralization, but there are natural constraints in terms of efficiency. This hinders its application scenario to the mainstream.

This is also a direction that Blockchain 3.0 has been exploring. Through higher performance, lower costs, and better scalability to meet the needs of more decentralized application scenarios.

The current throughput (TPS)of Bitcoin and Ethereum are both worrying. Bitcoin supports about 7 transactions per second on average, and Ethereum has about 15 transactions per second. If you make the block bigger, you can also increase the throughput, but it will cause the problem of block bloat. Last year, an encrypted cat game made everyone see the blockchain congestion problem. From a performance point of view, it takes a long time for blockchains to reach the mainstream.

In addition to the lack of tps performance, the transaction cost of the blockchain is high. Both ordinary users and developers cannot afford gas costs that are too high. For example, before the Ethereum based cyber cat game was hot, there was even a transaction fee compared to the encrypted cat. It is also expensive.

The HPB and EOS goals are similar, but their paths are completely different. HPB uses a combination of hardware and software, has its own dedicated chip hardware server, which makes it theoretically have considerably higher performance.

HPB is also trying to create an operating system architecture that can build applications. This architecture includes accounts, identity and authorization management, policy management, databases, asynchronous communications, program scheduling on CPUs, FPGAs, or clusters, and hardware accelerated technology, this realizes low delay and high concurrency and mega-level (tps) to meet the needs of commercial scenarios.

It is different from EOS. Its architecture, in addition to its software architecture and its hardware architecture, is a combination of hardware and software blockchain architecture that incorporates high-performance computing and cloud computing concepts. The hardware system includes a distributed core node composed of high performance computing hardware, a general communication network, and a cloud terminal supported by high performance computing hardware, thus HPB will not sacrifice decentralization for it’s high performance.

The core node supports a standard blockchain software architecture, including consensus algorithms, network communications, and task processing. It also introduces a hardware acceleration engine. It works with software to achieve high-performance tps through BOE technology (Blockchain Offload Engine) and consensus algorithm acceleration, data compression, and data encryption.

BOE makes HPB unique

In the HPB’s overall architecture, compared with other blockchain infrastructures, there are distinct differences. One of the most important is its BOE technology.

BOE mentioned above, is the blockchain offload engine. The BOE engine includes BOE hardware, BOE firmware, and matching software systems. It is a heterogeneous processing system that achieves high performance and high concurrent computational acceleration by combining CPU serial capabilities with the parallel processing capabilities of the FPGA/ASIC chip.

In the process of parsing TCP packets and UDP packets, the BOE module does not need to participate in the CPU, which can save CPU resources. The BOE module performs integrity checking, signature verification, and account balance verification on received messages such as transactions and blocks, performs fragment processing on large data to be transmitted, and encapsulates the fragments to ensure the integrity of the received data. At the same time, statistics work will be performed according to the received traffic of the TCP connection, and corresponding incentives will be provided according to the system contribution.

BOE has played its own role in signature verification speed, encryption channel security, data transmission speed, network performance, and concurrent connections.

The BOE acceleration engine embeds the ECDSA module. The main purpose of this module is to improve the speed of signature verification. ECDSA is also an elliptic curve digital signature algorithm. Although it is a mature algorithm that is widely used at present, the pure software method can only be performed thousands of times per second and cannot meet the high performance requirements. So the combination of BOE and ECDSA is a good attempt.

In the process of data transmission between different nodes, BOE needs to establish an encryption channel. In this process, it uses a hardware random number generator to implement the security of the encryption channel, because the seed of the random number of the key exchange becomes unpredictable.

The BOE acceleration engine also uses block data fragmentation broadcasting technology. The block fragment contains a complete block header, which facilitates the broadcast of newly generated blocks to all nodes. Through block data fragmentation, network data can be quickly transmitted between different nodes.

The BOE technology can perform traffic statistics of node connections based on hardware, and can calculate network bandwidth data provided by different nodes. Only providing network bandwidth to the system will have the opportunity to become a high contribution value node. In this way, incentives for the contribution of the nodes are provided.

In terms of concurrency, BOE is expected to maintain more than 10,000 TCP sessions and handle 10,000 concurrent sessions through an acceleration engine. BOE’s dedicated parallel processing hardware replaces traditional software serial processing functions such as transaction data broadcasting, unverified blockwide network broadcast, transaction confirmation broadcast, and so on.

According to HPB estimates, through the BOE acceleration engine, the session response speed and the number of session maintenance can reach more than 100 times the processing power of the general computing platform node. If the actual environment can be achieved, it is a huge performance improvement.

Consensus algorithm for internal and external bi-level elections

HPB not only greatly improves performance through BOE, but also adopts a double-layered internal and external voting mechanism in consensus algorithms. It tries to achieve more efficient consensus efficiency on the premise of ensuring security and privacy.

Outer election refers to the selection of high-contribution-value node members from many candidate nodes, and the election will use node contribution value evaluation indicators. Inner-layer election refers to an anonymous voting mechanism based on a hash queue. When a block is generated, it calculates which high-contribution value node preferentially generates a block. Nodes with high priority have the right to generate blocks preferentially.

So, how to choose high contribution value node? Here is the first indicator to evaluate the contribution value. The indicators include whether a BOE acceleration engine is configured, network bandwidth contribution (data throughput over a fixed period of time), reputation, and total node token holding time. Among them, the creditworthiness of the node is obtained through the analysis of participating transactions and data analysis such as packaged blocks and transaction forwarding.The total holding time of the node token can be obtained by real-time statistics on the account information.

Outer elections adopt an adaptive, consistent voting scheme. That is, by maintaining the consistency of “books” to ensure the consistency of outer elections, this can reduce network synchronization, and can also use the data of each node on the chain. The first is to put the above-mentioned four evaluation indicators into the block. By keeping the account books consistent, you can calculate the current ranking of all participating candidate nodes. The higher-ranking high-contribution value nodes will become official high contributions in the next round. Value node.

With the formal high contribution value node, the goal of the inner election is to find the high contribution value node corresponding to each block as soon as possible. The entire process is divided into three phases: nominations, statistics, and calculations. These three phases combine security, privacy, and performance.

The first is the nomination. At the beginning of the voting period, the BOE acceleration engine generates a random Commit. The high contribution value node submits its Commit, and the Commit synchronizes with the chain generated by the high-performance node. After the voting period is over, the Commit in the blockchain is started and the ticket pool is created. The last is the calculation. The calculation is mainly based on the weight algorithm to calculate the node’s generation priority in the block. Generate the highest-priority high-contribution value node and obtain the block package right.

Other nodes can verify the random number and address signature according to the principle of verifiable random function, which not only guarantees security, but also guarantees the unpredictability and privacy of high contribution value nodes.

In general, HPB’s consensus algorithm combines security, privacy, and speed through a combination of hardware and software. Using the BOE acceleration engine to generate random numbers, contribution value evaluation indicators, coherence ledgers, anonymous voting mechanisms, weight algorithms, signature verification, etc., privacy, reliability, security, and high efficiency are achieved.

Universal virtual machine design: support for different blockchains

The HPB virtual machine adopts a plug-in design mechanism and can support multiple virtual machines. It can realize the combination of the underlying virtual machine and upper level program language translation and support, and support the basic application of virtual machines. In addition, the external interface of the virtual machine can be realized through customized API operations, which can interact with the account data and external data.

The advantage of this mechanism is that it can realize the high performance of native code execution when the smart contract runs, and it can also realize the common virtual machine mechanism supporting different blockchains. For example, it can support Ethereum virtual machine EVM. The smart contract on EVM can also be used on HPB.

Neo’s virtual machine NeoVM can also be used on HPB. When high-performance scenarios are required, users of both EVM and NeoVM need only a small amount of adaptation to interact with other HPB applications.

The HPB smart contract has also made some improvements, such as the management of the life cycle, auditing and forming a common template. No progress can realize the full lifecycle management of smart contracts, such as the complete and controllable process management and integration rights management mechanism for intelligent contract submission, deployment, use, and logout.

In smart contract auditing, HPB conducts a protective audit that combines automated tool auditing with professional code design. In terms of templates, HPB gradually formed a generic smart contract template to support the flexible configuration of various common business scenarios.

Incentives for a positive cycle of token economy

When the high-contribution value node generates a block, it will receive a coinreward from the system. From the design of the HPB, the system will issue a coin reardof no more than 6% per year, and the additional coinswill be proportional to the total number of high-contribution nodes and candidate nodes.

In order to obtain the coin reward from the system, it must first become a high contribution value node, and only the high contribution value node has the right to generate a block.

In order to obtain the right to generate a block, it is necessary to contribute, including holding a certain number of HPB coins, having a BOE hardware acceleration engine, and contributing network bandwidth to the system.

From its mechanism, we can see that HPB’s token economic system design is considered from the formation of a positive incentive system. It maintains the overall HPB system by holding the HPB coin, having a BOE hardware acceleration engine, and contributing network bandwidth to the system. safe operation.

HPB landing: supports a variety of high-frequency scenes

In essence, HPB is a high-performance blockchain platform and an infrastructure that allows exploration of various blockchain applications. Including blockchain finance, blockchain games, blockchain entertainment, blockchain big data, blockchain anti-fake tracking, blockchain energy and many other fields.

In terms of finance, decentralized lending, decentralized asset management, etc. can all be built on the HPB platform to meet high-frequency lending and transaction scenarios.

In terms of games, although all game operations are not practical, the up-chaining and trading of assets such as game props are important scenes. Once the realization of the game product chain, you can ensure that the game assets are transparent, unique, can not be tampered with, never disappeared, etc., providing great convenience for trading between game products.

Compared with the traditional centralized service providers, there are many advantages. For example, there is no need to worry about the loss, confiscation, or change of game virtual goods, and the transaction flow becomes simple and convenient. Because HPB has a high-performance blockchain, it is expected to support millions of concurrents, and many high-frequency scenarios can also be met.

For blockchain entertainment, it can support the securitization of star assets, such as star-related token assets. In terms of blockchain big data, it can support the data right, ensure that the data owner controls the data ownership, ensure the authenticity of the data, traceability, can not be modified, and finally realize the data transaction according to the needs of different entities. , to ensure personal privacy and data security.

Based on HPB’s blockchain infrastructure, based on its high performance, blockchain applications can be built in multiple scenarios. The HPB design provides a blockchain application program interface and application development package. At the base layer of the HPB blockchain, it provides blockchain data access and interactive interfaces, and supports various applications and development languages ​​using JSON-RPC and RESTful APIs. It also supports multi-dimensional blockchain data query and transaction submission, and the interactive access interface can be integrated with the privilege control system.

The application development package includes comprehensive functional service packages that operate on blockchains based on different development languages. For example, it provides functional interfaces such as encryption, data signature, and transaction generation, and can seamlessly support integration and function expansion of various language service systems. , supports multiple language SDKs such as Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, and .NET.

Conclusion

If the future blockchain wants to enter the mainstream population, it must have high-performance public-chain or infrastructure support to form a true application ecosystem. Ethereum’s dream to build a decentralized ecosystem cannot be achieved on an existing basis. Ethereum is trying to improve performance and expand scalability through fragmentation, plasma, and pos consensus mechanisms.

At the same time, the current status quo has also spawned other public-linked efforts, including EOS, HPB etc. HPB has adopted a unique combination of hardware and software, accelerated by dedicated BOE hardware, signature verification speed, encrypted channel security, and data transmission. Speed, network performance, and high concurrent support all have their own advantages over simple software solutions.

In the software architecture, consensus algorithms for internal and external elections, flexible virtual machine design, application program interfaces, and development packages are also used to provide infrastructure for the development of blockchain application scenarios.

From the overall design of HPB, its goal is to provide high-performance infrastructure for the entire blockchain to mainstream people. With a high-performance infrastructure, blockchains can only be implemented in many high-frequency scenarios to create more application ecosystems and have the opportunity to reach mainstream people.

The HPB team focused on the technical background, including the founder Wang Xiaoming who was an early evangelist in the blockchain and once participated in the establishment of UnionPay Big Data, Beltal, and Beltal CTO. Co-Founder CTO Xu Li has more than 10 years of experience in chip industry R&D and management. He was responsible for the logic design, R&D, and FPGA chip marketing of the core products of the world’s top qualified equipment suppliers and the world’s largest component distributors. Technical VP Shu Shanlin once worked for Inspur, a well-known Chinese server manufacturer, as an embedded chief engineer, and has extensive R&D experience in embedded software and underlying software. Another co-founder, Li Jinxin, is a former blockchain analyst of Guotai Junan and has extensive experience in digital asset investment.

The background of the team members is in line with the HPB’s soft and hard path. According to the latest monthly report, the basic PCB layout design of BOE boards, the overall architecture design of BOE, and the ECC acceleration scheme have also been completed. At the same time, several tests have been completed for the BOE hardware acceleration engine.

It is hoped that HPB will develop rapidly and will embark on a path with its own characteristics in the future of blockchain infrastructure competition. It will provide support for more decentralized applications and eventually build a prosperous ecosystem.

Risk Warning: All Blue Fox articles do not constitute investment recommendations, investment risks, it is recommended to conduct in-depth inspection of the project, and carefully make their own investment decisions.

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