Comprehensive Analysis of the Technical Highlight and Development Prospects
The Global Blockchain Computing Conference 2020 was held on Aug 22 and 23 in Chengdu, China. The Conference focused on new infrastructure, covering the fields of PoW, IPFS and PoC, and was co-hosted by Babbitt, Chain Node and Inbit.
MASSNet is the most eye-catching and concerned PoC project this year. MASS developer Elon delivered a speech in one of the Conference topic “New Definition of Future Storage”. And MASSCafe, an ecological community of MASS, set up a booth at the Conference to show participants the development of the community and the related products incubated.
MASS Net has completed the cold start
The PoC consensus algorithm of MASS is the best implementation of Spacemint’s paper, and is a new generation of safe and efficient PoC consensus algorithm. MASSNet is the first chain built on the algorithm, positioning as the value anchor in the MASS ecosystem. The mainnet was launched in September 2019 and the current total capacity is 220 P, with 361 full-node miners distributed in the United States, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Sichuan, Jiangsu, Guangdong, etc in China. The transaction volume on the chain is about 1.61 million, and the throughput in the real environment has reached 200 TPS. A secure, decentralized and highly practical PoC public chain has initially constructed.
The PoC capacity consensus algorithm has adopted hard drive mining, with the features of low threshold, low energy consumption and decentralization, which will help the construction of the consensus network. That is, everyone can conduct PoC mining at home, which is simple and the vitality is strong. And this is the reason why PoC can grow rapidly under the stress of PoW.
MASS aims to build a PoC application ecosystem
Different from the PoC projects on the current market, the goal of MASS is to create a blockchain application ecosystem based on the capacity consensus. The uniqueness of the PoC consensus has determined that it naturally supports multi-chain ecology, and MASS takes this feature to the extreme. It encapsulates the MASS algorithm as a general-purpose MASS consensus engine, and developers can construct their own blockchains by calling the interface of the MASS consensus engine. All blockchains based on this can share the consensus provided by the same node network. Therefore:
From the perspective of miners, the mining nodes can maintain multiple blockchain systems independently.
From the perspective of chains, each chain is maintained by the same huge network of miners.
Besides, after the release of cross-chain protocol, miners can provide witness services for the cross-chain protocol directly. This means that the MASS cross-chain protocol can complete the exchange of assets between chains without relying on the credit of the relay chain.
Technical theory and engineering realization
The rapid development and the large ecological pattern of MASS come from the support of profound theoretical knowledge.
The theory of MASS capacity consensus algorithm was first proposed by the top computer scientists of MIT, and the related development is led by MASS Core and completed by many community members. It can be seen from GitHub that the project implementation of MASS is quite practical.
Function realization: Seen from the open source code on GitHub, MASSNet has realized all its functions in the whitepaper, and all modules are complete.
Code grid: Mainly written in Go language, and many functions are written with some in-depth version features of Go.
Code completion: The unit test coverage of each module has exceeded 80%, and the document description is complete.
Technological innovation: By tracking the dependent libraries of related functions, only the cryptographic libraries of btcsuite and Tendermint and the related functions of the network library are cited. Multiple modules like serialization, database and P2P network have adopted relatively new technologies.
Code originality: The code coincidence degree with btcd is 4.7%, 0.63% with that of eth and 1.2% with Tendermint.
Development support: There are complete technical documentation, the comments of key functions in the code and the API documentation are comprehensive, and the unit test granularity is fine enough.
Prospects and industrial environment
The positioning of the MASS consensus engine is innovative and the development of multi-chain ecology is expected. The technical construction of MASS has fully considered the demand of ecological development, and the two-tier expansion, cross-chain and smart contracts will be realized gradually in the future.
From the perspective of the industrial environment, the current PoW mining field is faced with transformation, and the stock hard disk of Filecoin is too large to be converted. These external conditions will all benefit the development of the MASS ecosystem.
Following PoW and PoS, MASS will probably start the blockchain application ecosystem under the PoC consensus. With the features of decentralization, high performance, scalability and security equivalent to PoW, MASS is expected to become the infrastructure of the new generation of PoC.
