Improving blockchain scalability

For this week’s Bluzelle Telegram Live, it’s a partner special featuring Zilliqa’s Co-Founder Amrit Kumar. He brought us lots of good insights regarding the partnership between both companies.

About Amrit Kumar

Amrit Kumar, Co-Founder of Zilliqa

Amrit is a co-founder of Zilliqa and a researcher by profession. He holds a PhD from Université Grenoble-Alpes, France and was hosted at Inria’s Grenoble center. Prior to his PhD, he obtained an Engineer’s diploma from Ecole Polytechnique, France, where he studied Computer Science and Mathematics. His research interests broadly span security, privacy and applied cryptography.

Discussion Summary

Q1: Hi Amrit, really happy to have you join us today! So we’ve collected some questions from the public, and for starters, a large number of investors in Bluzelle are also investors in Zilliqa. How would this partnership benefit future Developers of Zilliqa?

A: Investors are the first people from the community to kickstart a project. Having common investors means several key things. Most importantly common interests to boost the adoption of the product and the project. Considering the fact that Zilliqa and Bluzelle are partnering, this will pave the way for further adoption of both projects. On the Bluzelle side, it would mean that more dApp developers will come on board, while on the Zilliqa side, this would mean that dApp developers can build even more interesting dApps without worrying too much about where to store their backend database securely.

Q2: Thanks, Amrit, so what items of action are involved in the partnership? E.g. will developers who use Zilliqa also be encouraged or required to use Blz?

A: Yes, the dApp developers will have to pay for the decentralized storage service in the native Bluzelle tokens. But, this should reduce the high cost of on-chain storage. I personally feel that blockchains have potential to give real-world dApps that require considerable storage. But, the problem of storing that data on-chain makes it difficult for developers to build such dApps. With Bluzelle, things will change.

Q3: Hey Amrit, this actually relates to one of the question submitted. Isn’t blockchain a database itself? Does this mean that public data can be stored on Zilliqa and private (encrypted) data are stored in Bluzelle?

A: First a blockchain is not just a database. Consider using Bitcoin or Ethereum or Zilliqa where you replace the blockchain by a nosql database where any user or any node can freely insert, remove or update entries. These are the usual operations you do on a regular database. But, if you allow such operations to happen in a malicious environment, then miners can double spend and edit the history of transactions. The result being the entire system will collapse and cease to function. And this is exactly why you need a consensus protocol so that the network agrees on the set of changes that should happen. Also, blockchains are append-only ledger, and hence many of the operations that one can do on a regular database are not allowed on a blockchain. In short, blockchains are a bit different. Blockchains can store encrypted data too; the only problem is the cost.

Q4: Will Bluzelle’s underlying storage mechanism be “baked into” the Zilliqa APIs that a dApp Dev would interact with, or will that be a separate concern for the Developer to implement?

A: Bluzelle will have its APIs and Zilliqa will provide developers ways to plugin to those. They will not need to implement that part.

Q5: Amrit — can you please outline your posture on GDPR and managing user’s data while performing Blockchain-based digital advertising supply?

A: There are several cryptographic and privacy-enhancing/preserving mechanisms to ensure that private data can be safely handled without much concern on the extracted utility. For instance, it is possible for a data owner to publish an encrypted data and allow operations like search on the encrypted data without revealing any information beyond the search result. There are other mechanisms such as private matching algorithms that allow “encrypted” data to be compared. Privacy-preserving mechanisms such as differential privacy are also promising solutions.

Q6: Can you tell us how Zilliqa and Bluzelle would work out in terms of crypto-economics?

A: I think it is going to be very interesting see how the native tokens on each side will cross the network and the impact that it will have. The tokens will clearly get distributed to a large network. Zilliqa token holders will also have an incentive to hold Bluzelle tokens. And there will be a mechanism to exchange Zilliqa tokens for Bluzelle tokens.

Q7: Hi Amrit! What do u feel about the efficiency of decentralized database compared to the current database, will it be slower and less efficient? How can Zilliqa help with this problem? Adding on to that, since Zilliqa’s highlight is on its high TPS, would Bluzelle be able to keep up with the high transaction rate?

A: Hi! The idea that I personally like in Bluzelle is the concept of sharding (in Bluzelle’s terminology, a swarm), an idea that we at Zilliqa have been working on too. In fact, Zilliqa is all about sharding. We have shown through our protocol that a distributed system can give a throughput that can match centralized payment services like VISA. Now, if the same technology as in Bluzelle is used for distributed storage, I don’t see any reason why a distributed storage platform cannot match the performance of centralized services (if not beat them). Let us consider the worst-case scenario where there is a mismatch between the performance of the two networks. In that case, a Zilliqa dApp will require to batch queries to the Bluzelle network. By batching, one ensures that the round-trip cost can be reduced and performance is not that affected.

Q8: What is the benefit of having TPS of VISA is that necessary?

A: Consider Bitcoin for instance. Its throughput is around 5 tx/s. Now, imagine 10 people trying to transact during a 1 second period. Only five of those will be able to send their transactions through and the rest will have have to wait. This severely limits the extent to which Bitcoin can be used in a real-world setting with thousands of people transacting at the same time. With smart contracts, throughput becomes even more important. So, scalability of blockchains is crucial for its wider adoption.

Q9: By using sharding will the number of nodes used in Zillqa restricted?

A:In order to guarantee security, we require that the number of nodes in a shard has to be at least 600.

Q10: How will Zilliqa’s chain integrate with Bluzelle’s database? Does it mean that potentially, someone using Bluzelle’s database would be able to talk to multiple chains?

A: I think Bluzelle will certainly admit some-level of cross-chain communication via its API. Now, how expressive that can be will depend on the APIs. I am waiting for the Bluzelle team to surprise us.