The case: 0L Network
Originated from Goliath, to take on Goliath.
Over the years we’ve witnessed multiple smart contract platforms trying to live up to the promise of creating a global, high performant and decentralized smart contract platform that solves the challenges which older protocols are struggling with. The first successful smart contract platform is Ethereum and saw a lot of so-called ‘Ethereum killers’ such as EOS and Tezos, since 2020 we’ve seen also other big names coming up such as Avalanche and Solana and with the most recent on that list Aptos, Sui AND 0LNetwork.
Rewind to the 18th of June 2019, former Facebook (nowadays known as Meta) announced that they will launch their own currency they called ‘Libra’ and was set to launch somewhere in 2020. A long story short, the project faced a lot of opposition and criticism that eventually led to a termination of the project.
This event indirectly contributed to the birth of 0L Network. Ironically isn’t it? A project that is synonymous to centralization results in the total opposite, a decentralized smart contract platform without any centralized support.
What differentiates 0L Network?
From a technical perspective, quite a lot. They inherited the Libra codebase, Meta or not, the initial codebase they received was quite topnotch and contains cool innovations pioneered by very smart engineers over at Meta. However they had to adjust some technical parameters to cut out some undesired - read permissioned - components such as (but not limited to):
A private key with the power to censor
Implement sybil resistant mechanisms
Permissionless creation of accounts
Introduce tokenomics based on a permissionless environment
It’s noteworthy that some of these technical concepts aren’t implemented in other blockchains we’ve seen today such as Avalanche and Solana.
Executor
The Libra codebase allows for ‘decoupled execution’ meaning that it can be checked if transactions are successful while at the same time other operations in the mempool are being carried out. By allowing this form of parallelization it’s able to immensely scale the transaction throughput because the executor checks if a transaction can be properly processed in parallel with other ongoing operations within the mempool.
Delay towers
To create an even playing field for all validators, 0L Network introduced a feature they call ‘Delay Towers’ and is based on Proof-of-Elapsed-Time (PoET). This is a variant of the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism without the high energy consumption or centralizing factors we’re familiar with from PoW networks such as Bitcoin. Mining delay towers differentiates from the PoW operations since its sequential and can’t be parallelized, therefore it won’t make any sense to have a lot of (powerful) computational resources. The image shows the difference between these two methods.
The Delay towers, with their PoET mechanism, are complementary to the currently used Libra BFT and can be utilized to create a persistent identity for nodes as a sybil resistant mechanism by providing a mix of security and performance. Every new potential validator node needs to submit configuration information to the network. So the proof of the previous block will serve as a preimage for the next block.
For the BFT protocol to build blocks, it at least needs to reach 2/3 of the majority consensus while every validator has some “voting power” in the consensus. In its current form, the towers height is equivalent to the voting power within the consensus process. While time passes by, the relative advantage of early nodes fade away resulting into a minimal difference and a relatively balanced distribution. It must be said that the tower height doesn’t per se has any economic advantages since all the validators contribute equally to the network and rewards are divided equally among all the compliant validators.
A new network participant can get started by downloading the Carpe desktop app, which is a combination of a wallet and light miner to mine your first tokens on a simple desktop. However, there currently is a proposal going on to seperate these two as well and let Carpe just continue as a desktop-based wallet.
Mempool
The mempool is structured in a different manner compared to traditional blockchain architecture where transaction just sit in the mempool waiting to be included. While the transactions are pending, they have no certainty of being included by other parties. If a validator in 0L Network receives a transaction, it has to make sure that it will be included in the mempools of the other validator. This might change in the future wherein 0L Network may implement a Narwhal and Tusk DAG-based mempool. See the ‘Roadmap’ for more info on this topic.
Programming model
The Libra codebase is written in Rust and is being shipped with a smart contract programming language called ‘Move’ and is comparable to Rust. The benefit of this language is that it’s pretty safe and relatively easy to work with, even if you’re not a seasoned developer. For the developers among us, there’s the ‘Move Book’ developed by Damir Shamayev and contains useful developer information.
Instead of smart contracts, the project uses something called ‘modules’. Everybody can create these modules which subsequently can be imported by other modules or even transactions. Many of the things that happen in smart contracts can actually be performed within the module and transaction scripts, which can be imported from the module. This specific programming model allows for greater composability since the modules allow for a kind of ‘plug and play’ kind of development in which you need to add minimal changes if you want to launch for example a fungible token.
Hustle Karma
Since 0L Network is a fully decentralized network, without any centralized backers, it’s fully dependent on community effort and therefore they need to allocate their resources as efficient as possible. 0L Network values real work and not just spam messages in the Discord, thus the community will be the ultimate beneficiary of transforming this into a successful project.
Said participants of 0L Network can propose tasks and DAO-members can put up a bounty for their labor. Depending on the specific tasks, the bounties can be quite significant.
Tokenomics
There will be a revamp coming up of their tokenomics so I won’t cover that for now but good to keep an eye out for that development. As of the time of writing these proposals are laid out regarding the tokenomics here. Alfa leak: the tokenomics are going to be capped and emissions will be going down.
Roadmap
The mainnet of 0L Network is live since 21st of October 2021 but still has some challenges to overcome. These challenges are put out in the roadmap and are (not chronically ordered):
Enhance network reliability
There are some technical hurdles to overcome which will increase the stability of the network.
Increase the productivity per contributor
Currently resources (in the form of human labor) are occupied with managing downtime which is quite resource intensive. This process needs to be standardized so it will increase the efficiency.
Create an established version of the Carpe app
The Carpe app is currently in Alpha mode and to get it production ready it will undergo some technical updates on the backend.
Cross chain communication
There will be an Optimistic bridge two-way bridge to Ethereum but for that to take place some hurdles have to overcome first.
Integrate Upstream Merge V6
Integrate the latest updates from the Diem library
Another technological feature that might be implemented in the future which I personally find very fascinating is the Narwhal and Tusk DAG-based mempool.
Narwhal and Tusk DAG-based mempool
According to the Meta engineers, the consensus mechanism isn’t as much of a solution in scaling but instead it should be sought after in the mempool. For the sake of this article I’ll be just giving a high level overview of Narwhal and Tusk and how this works.
The idea behind Narwhal and Tusk is that the mempool is responsible for separating the data propagation whereas agreement upon the metadata will be taken care of by the consensus protocol.
Every node in the network has a version of the mempool that constains n amount of workers. These workers process the client transactions and send them on to the their counterparts in the other nodes. These workers, inside the mempool of a node, also send a hash of the transactions to a primary worker and this primary worker will send it to the mempool.
The primary will send the hashes to a block header and will embed all the data it’s got so far. The validators subsequently vote on the blockheader if it’s the first they see, subsequently the group it into a certificate and this process effectively is forming a round.
Tusk is being used for the interpretation of the aforementioned rounds, Tusk just interpreters the DAG by looking at the leaders of the round. If no leader is appointed for round 1 (and can’t achieve consensus) they’ll just go on to round 2, if no leader has been found, go on to round 3 etc. If they happen to appoint a leader in one of the next rounds, they can construct it all the way back to round 1. If in a future round a leader will be committed, it’s possible to validate a lot of transactions of the previous rounds at once retrospectively.
This method of validating transactions is the opposite of how other protocols process transactions (impending) transactions within their mempool where it basically is just an unordered group of transactions.
Regulatory angle
Another USP that deserves to be mentioned is the way that 0L Network is planning to prevent regulatory attack vectors. Their strategy is very simple, and they’re doing it in Satoshi style, the protocol is built with a decentralization-first principle. However, protocols that are launched in a fully decentralized manner are facing somewhat of struggle regarding contribution as well as gaining traction. That 0L Network isn’t just a community initiative without structure and longevity can be seen by the diversity of skillsets and structures of the workgroups (decentralized workforce structure for 0L Network). Some of the well known individuals contributing to it such as:
Decentralization is dead. Long live decentralization✊☀️
Thank you Theodore Detweiler & Daniyal for providing feedback on this article.
Disclaimer: Nothing in this article is financial advise and solely serves educational purposes. As of the time of writing, the author isn’t in possession of 0L tokens however this might change in the future.
Previously I stated that Michael Egorov was involved with the project but after publishing I received sounds that questioned this. Because I couldn’t independently verify this, I’ve left it out.