Why is open source of standardized cross-chain technology so important?

nbsp; Web3  And the history of blockchain industry, it is not difficult to find that its development is following the law of upward dimension. The original blockchain industry was only. Bitcoin  A public chain. And then, there was the. Ethereum  With the addition of smart contracts, on-chain ecology becomes possible. A new dimension of ecology is added to the dimension of the public chain. Today, cross-chains, where assets or data can be transferred and exchanged between chains, make blockchains more like three dimensions.

With the diversification of blockchain networks, cross-chain technology can break the isolation between different blockchains and promote the interconnection of assets and data between different blockchains. At the same time, cross-chain can also meet the needs of different blockchain networks to work together, so as to better meet the needs of users, improve the performance and function of blockchain, and thus prosper the Web3 ecosystem.

Cross-chain is so important that we need to discuss how to design cross-chain solutions and what characteristics a good cross-chain solution should have.

From computer interconnection to blockchain cross-chain

Before we get to cross-chain, perhaps we can learn from the history of computer interconnection.

1967  A research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lawrence  G.  Roberts  Began to build a "distributed network" and proposed the following year. ARPAnet. With the development of several years, 1981  Year   ARPAnet  The number of nodes changed from the initial   4  An extension to   94  It can connect to computers on U.S. soil and via satellite communications to devices in places like London and Norway.

However, as the network continues to expand and driven by application demand, ARPAnet  Gradually evolved into a large network consisting of multiple networks and multiple transport protocols. The number of computers connected to the network has expanded rapidly, making it difficult to locate the target computer in the complex network and the lack of error correction. Errors in data transmission may cause network downtime. Access   ARPAnet  As the number of computers increased, the number of computers making errors increased and the overall efficiency of the network began to decline.

TCP/IP  The emergence of protocols changed the status quo, TCP/IP  Protocol provides a common communication protocol that allows different types of heterogeneous networks to communicate and interact with each other. TCP  Responsible for monitoring the transmission process to ensure data integrity and reliability. And   IP  It is responsible for assigning a unique address to the computer device and routing the packet to the correct destination address.

TCP/IP  It laid the foundation for today's Internet of Everything, and its success cannot be separated from a series of features, including openness, standardization, compatibility, reliability, scalability and so on. From the Internet of Everything to the Internet of Everything, the development of blockchain across chains follows a similar logic.

Blockchain cross-chain standard issued, universal

4  Month   26  IEEE (International Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) released the world's first blockchain cross-chain standard on Wednesday. (P3205). The standard was established in   2020  Year   5  Ant Group, China Institute of Electronic Technology Standardization, Chinese Academy of Sciences, State Grid Power, Baidu, etc. 20  China Enterprise Organization, 50  It took several staff members. 3  In 2005, the joint compilation was completed.

P3205  The release of the blockchain cross-chain standard means that there is an international consensus in the field of blockchain cross-chain theory and technology in the future. IEEE  Li Ming, chairman of the Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Standardization Committee of the Association for Computing Machines, said at the press conference that the significance of cross-chain technology is to break the silos of data and let value cross the barriers between chains for direct circulation. The significance of issuing cross-chain standards is to agree on a unified communication protocol, just as people who used to speak different dialects start to speak Mandarin, which will greatly reduce the cost of communication.

As one of the main sponsors of the standard, Ant Chain has developed cross-chain technical services based on this standard. AntChain  Bridge (Ant chain Cross-chain protocol). AntChain  Bridge  It has also become the first engineering landing product of this standard.

The best way to spread standards is to open source the technology

"From the perspective of industry demand, we increasingly feel that cross-chain needs to start from the standard, in order to really promote the whole industry to any scene, any heterogeneous chain interconnection. AntChain today decided to open source the cross-chain component AntChain Bridge, sharing the blockchain technology precipitation and accumulation of Ant cross-chain over the years with developers, and jointly building the industry ecology." Ant chain technical director Yan Ying said.

Ant chain gave a timeline, will be open source AntChain  Bridge each function module, finally achieve the system all open source goal.

How an Ant Chain Cross-chain Scheme Can Become a Cross-chain Boundary   TCP/IP

"Openness" and "standardization" are the premises

TCP/IP  Protocols can become mainstream and use Super   after launch; 50  The main reason for this is its openness and standardization. From standards launched three years ago to active open source today, AntChain  Bridge's goal is undoubtedly to become the most widely used and accepted cross-chain infrastructure on the blockchain circuit.

Ant Group Inc. 2016  Since the establishment of blockchain team in 2000, we have been focusing on the research and practice of blockchain technology. Back in the day 2018  In 2000, Ant Chain began to research and launch commercial cross-chain products. ODATS (Open  Data  Access  Trust  Service), has more than 60 patents, become one of the pioneers of cross-chain technology exploration.

This is based on IEEE standard AntChain  Bridge  The cross-chain is abstracted into a generalized model, the whole cross-chain process is expressed using standardized semantics, and the key concepts are explained and the field design is given.

In addition to openness and standardization, AntChain  Bridge  For developers to provide a simple cross-chain plug-in. SDK can obtain cross-chain system contract and cross-chain business contract by filling relevant implementation as required, which is conducive to rapid development and adaptation.

The cross-chain process mainly includes four parts: blockchain domain name registration, blockchain registration to the relay network, relay monitoring of the blockchain ledger, and relay routing of cross-chain messages.

  Before crossing the chain, blockchain operators need to communicate with BCDNS (understandable as blockchain   DNS, to some extent, is equivalent to   IP) to select and register a domain name, the operator can sign the blockchain trust anchor information, and publish it to BCDNS, other cross-chain parties can obtain the domain name holder information through BCDNS. Operators will then register the blockchain with the relay network. The relay will listen to the ledger data through the heterogeneous chain implementation of the BBC instance. Finally, relay routing implements cross-chain messaging.

AntChain  Bridge  Also provides for heterogeneous chains. SDK supports plug-in access to cross-chain networks.

From   AntChain  Bridge  On the design, we seem to be able to see. TCP/IP  The shadow of However, cross-chain protocol is faced with the challenge of   TCP/IP  Different challenges and problems require continuous optimization and improvement for actual scenarios.

The combination of hardware and software provides a "safe" escort

And   TCP/IP  Different protocols require higher security as cross-chain transfer of assets is involved. According to incomplete statistics, the attack on the cross-chain bridge involves super   20  Hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.

AntChain  Bridge  Different solutions are provided according to the required security of the protocol. Hardware and software combined with a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) solution, which is a method by   CPU  Hardware provides protection and secure computing based on memory isolation. The current mainstream Intel  CPU  All default hardware support   AntChain  Bridge, no additional hardware costs.

AntChain  Bridge  Pure software solutions are also supported, including   SPV  Proof and nbsp; The PoA. Follow-up, AntChain  Bridge  Pairs   will also be added. ZKP  The support of

Heterogeneous open "scalability"

With the development of technology and the increase of users and network scale, both   TCP/IP  Both cross-chain protocols face scalability problems. Therefore, the ceiling is higher for cross-chain protocols with scalability.

This time, the ant chain cross-chain protocol passed. BTN  Network capability builds unity on complex and diverse network environment. Layer0  Accelerated network, combined   FAIR  The integration of privacy-based computing and on - chain computing makes the system have heterogeneous and open expansibility.

BTN  It is a communication technology solution for the construction of global trusted digital network launched by Ant Chain, which has the characteristics of low delay, low bandwidth, high availability and multi-compatibility. It is reported that BTN  Can increase the throughput of blockchain networks. 186%, reduced bandwidth cost   80%, delay reduction   Forty percent.

Of course, this is the first time for ant chain to bring new development direction to the industry through technological innovation. Previously, ant chain in order to break the bottleneck of blockchain storage, launched. LETUS  The system. On the basis of ensuring security, verifiability and data integrity, the storage mode is changed to improve the storage efficiency.

Cross-chain final solution or extremely "compatible" Layer1

In fact, the ant chain cross - chain protocol has been put forward in the cross - chain standard about the cross - chain final solution. The cross-chain protocols that can become the mainstream of the market will be highly compatible. Layer1. Among them, it needs to be compatible with different network volumes, different performance and heterogeneous chains.

Based on this, Ant Chain launched a large-scale blockchain development architecture "HOU (Thick)".

HOU  Is a summary of Ant Chain's ability to scale blockchain into the "mass application" stage. HOU  Stand for Scale  Hybrid, Scale  Out, Scale  Up, respectively, corresponds to heterogeneous open scalability, large-scale horizontal scalability, and large-scale scenario performance scalability.

In order to meet such a large and complex blockchain system and realize the expansion of H, O and U, Ant Chain has proposed a variety of industry innovation technologies, such as   LETUS  Storage, BaaS  Multi-region parallel networking technology. IEEE  The standard heterogeneous cross-chain is   HOU  nbsp; H  With the last piece of the puzzle completed, the flourishing blockchain ecosystem has a solid and stable technical base.

HOU  Eg. The appearance means that the "compatibility" is extremely high. It is about to be born. Both alliance chain and public chain can be connected to the system. The era of blockchain interconnection is coming, and the story of ecological application also realizes scene interconnection and value interconnection on this basis. Just as Jiang Guofei, senior vice president of Ant Group and president of digital technology business group, thought, in the future, public chain and alliance chain will be integrated in the technical framework, and produce the application scenario of "Web2  commercial application  + &nbSP;Web3  incentive mechanism". Openness, standardization, high security, expansibility and compatibility are also important technical ideas of this vision.

Just at the end of last month, Eg. A hot topic of discussion. Founder Jen-Hsun Huang 2023  GTC  At the conference, it said, nbsp; iPhone  The time has come to explode everyone's enthusiasm for AI. Not long ago, the Web3 Carnival in Hong Kong attracted Web3 enthusiasts from all over the world. Many mainland companies organized groups to attend the festival. Combined with the launch of the first global cross-chain standard and Ant Chain's immediate open sourcing of its own cross-chain technology based on the standard, a series of moves may presage a seemingly "cold" market. Web3, is about to have its own. iPhone  The moment.