Linera: a new public chain with Facebook background

Original author: Crescent< /a>, Rhythm BlockBeats

Responsible editor: 0x29

New public The story of the chain is not over yet. Solana, Avalanchr, and Near have not completely satisfied users. The story of the new public chain is bound to continue. Today BlockBeats  briefly introduces Linera to readers, a new network built by former Facebook employees and just received $6 million in financing led by a16z.

Simply put, Linera is an application designed to bring Web2 scalability and low latency to Web3 Layer 1 blockchain project.

From Meta

Linera was founded in 2021. The founding team includes engineers and researchers from former Zcash, former Meta/Novi and London Metropolitan University. They all have strong technical backgrounds in Web2 and Web3.

I have to mention Mathieu Baudet, the founder and CEO of Linera, as a software engineer at Meta (formerly Facebook) , participated in the creation of the Diem (formerly Libra) blockchain. Mathieu Baudet has a Ph.D. in encryption protocols, is familiar with BFT consensus protocols, and has extensive experience in blockchain infrastructure, artificial intelligence infrastructure, developer infrastructure, security consulting, and entrepreneurial development.

a16z seems to be particularly fond of projects created by former Meta members, not only has led investment in Web3 infrastructure founded by former Meta members The provider, Mysten Labs, also led an investment in Layer 1 blockchain Aptos, also founded by former Meta members. The US$6 million seed round financing completed by Linera is still led by a16z, and other investors include Cygni Capital, Kima Ventures and Tribe Capital.

Original intention

Blockchains have historically excelled at censorship resistance, but there are currently many applications that require low latency. For example, in retail payments, micropayments of game applications, self-operated transactions, and connections between blockchains, it is necessary to respond to user operations as soon as possible. In the blockchain, due to the consumption of the memory pool and the mutual coordination between the validators, the fastest confirmation time is still a few seconds.

Linera CEO Mathieu Baudet was involved in the latest research on distributed systems when he was at Meta. Changing Blockchain Scalability FastPay and Zef Both protocols have generated strong interest. Here, he realized that simple operations like payments could be greatly sped up by removing the mempool entirely and minimizing interactions between validators.

In these protocols, blockchain clients communicate directly with validators to submit and confirm new account operations. The Linera block draws on this notion and hopes to generalize this approach to enable most account-based operations to be confirmed within a fraction of a second, creating a low-latency blockchain.

Linear expansion

In the current daily life, Internet users often navigate, shop, and watch videos through the Internet. They have become accustomed to a smooth Internet experience and have very low tolerance for network slowdown or service interruption.

But at the very beginning, Web2 applications were not as smooth as they are now. Shackles, the transition to horizontal scalability that the industry calls "linear scaling." Linear scaling means that it is always possible to double the system capacity by doubling the number of machines.

Currently, however, blockchains are prioritizing a "sequential" execution model that allows user accounts and smart contracts to Arbitrary interactions within transactions, but sequential execution prevents linear scaling. The Linera team believes that it is necessary for future decentralized systems to provide low latency guarantees at any scale, comparable to the evolution of databases from SQL to NoSQL.

So Linera will develop and promote a new execution model for linear scaling, where by default in different In the thread of execution, operations on different user accounts will run concurrently. This way, it is always possible to scale the execution by adding new processing units to each validator. In traditional web2 architectures, these additional processing units (called "workers" or "shards") are provided on-demand by data centers or cloud providers.

Insist on decentralization

< p>As mentioned above, the verifier is used as the data center, so does this violate the original intention of Linera's decentralization?

To solve this problem, Linera expects to use the most advanced proof-of-stake mechanism and scalable audit procedures to ensure the integrity of the Linera protocol Decentralization, thus ensuring full accountability of validators.

Facing the decentralization of the blockchain, there is often a saying of "three dilemmas of the blockchain", specifically Achieving scalability, security, and decentralization at the same time is extremely difficult.

However, Linera believes that this conclusion is only applicable to fixed-scale verifiers. In theory, there is still a lot of room for improvement. Also, because it is impossible for a single auditor to run all transactions, it has always been challenging to handle high-throughput systems with commodity hardware.

Therefore, Linera intends to use its concurrent execution model to support large-scale auditing by the community, and at the same time pay close attention to the field of validity proof Ongoing progress.

Linera Target

Linera targets low latency and linear scalability, and is currently working on implementing the first steps of the Linera protocol and open source release.

In terms of low latency, Baudet said: I hope that the speed of user interaction can be close to that of traditional exchanges, and the standard centralized The system rewards these actions in near real time very quickly.

For linear scalability, Web2 system can add additional processing units as needed, while in Linera, Consists of shards of the chain, or individual threads, with additional validators added to improve network efficiency.

Compared with the Aptos public chain also created by Facebook members, Aptos emphasizes scalability while emphasizing scalability. In addition to focusing on scalability, Linera pays more attention to the low latency of the network, and the subdivision directions of the two are slightly different. In terms of project progress, Aptos is clearly one step ahead.

< p>Many new Layer 1 public chains have been born one after another. Although it is still uncertain which public chain is the future, fortunately we have never given up on exploring. Expect Linera to fulfill its vision of bringing Web2 performance and reliability to the Web3 world.

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