The first ever Mainnet event was held at Korea University’s Future Convergence Technology Center on October 19th, 2018. Professor Kim Hyoung-joong, head of Korea University's Cryptocurrency Research Center, who led the event, explained, "by comparing the standards of Mainnet with Ethereum and EOS, we are able to objectively scrutinize the advantages and disadvantages, so that if there are shortcomings, we will be able to compensate for them so as to give it international competitiveness." This first event included "WIZBL," which has completed its Mainnet, and "SymVerse", whose Mainnet is still under construction. The judges evaluated the two Main networks based on the documents and presentations they submitted. Prof. Kim Hyoung-joong expressed his hope that “the evaluation results will help to improve the global competitiveness of both two companies.”
WIZBL
WIZBL aims at 1 million transactions per second (TPS), with a shorter block creation time compared to Bitcoin. WIZBL's total issuance limit is 500,000,000 WBL. Currently, about two-thirds of the coins are being distributed on the market, with mining and distribution of the remaining coins under consideration. Another distinguishing feature of WIZBL is the concept of “transaction verification compensation” in order to encourage the participation of pool nodes. This means that if the wallet node set to the pool node is maintained by the network for at least 1 hour, the commission generated during that time will be shared.
There is usually something lost at the expense of something gained in the field of engineering, so we should look carefully to see what is being sacrificed in order to produce such speedy transactions. It remains to be seen whether there will be a sacrifice made in decentralization. In other words, WIZBL creates a family group for a quick negotiation, and a mining node is selected from the nodes in the family group, which creates a block, and proposes a PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) agreement protocol between the nodes in the family group.
In the creation of these groups, whether or not the process of selection from among the groups is decentralizing or undermining other values is one of the most important things to consider as we move forward. In addition, a more rigorous analysis of whether 1 million TPS are possible in a real environment, or simulations of an environment mimicking a real environment, seems necessary.
WIZBL has not yet implemented smart contract functionality, but has indicated its development by the middle of next year at the latest. Also, they are currently in talks to develop a technology-related website for communications with dApp developers. The WIZBL Mainnet explorer is open to the public at https://explorer.wizbl.io/. Through the WIZBL Mainnet explorer, we found that the current family group has 50 nodes; however, all the nodes in the current family group are said to be operating in the WIZBL Foundation. If we look at WIZBL's transaction activities, there is no trade for most of the blocks that currently have only one transaction per block, and there is a large deviation in the block creation time, from 10 minutes to 1 hour, which seems to be due to the blocks being generated as the transactions occur.
SymVerse
SymVerse is a platform that is attempting to implement a number of concepts that would be beneficial, if successful. This type of multi-fronted approach can have both advantages and disadvantages and the difficulty of implementation can also increase. SymVerse intends to distribute new coins and fees to platform participants. It identifies various platform participants and proposes a distribution criteria. Specifically, allocation is as follows: 30% to dApp, 30% to wallet nodes, 20% to work nodes, 10% to guarantee nodes, and 10% to CA(Certificate Authority) and public service nodes. The total supply coin amount of SymVerse is 10 billion SYM, and the supply amount is automatically adjusted every quarter by the supply function.
It is very important for Mainnet to design mechanisms that work on the basis of the Cryptoeconomy. This is because each participant makes rational decisions and acts as an independent agent. Participants may leave the network at any time, depending on their interests. Therefore, system design is crucial, so as to allow a check and balance of each individual's decisions.
A well-designed system is an important factor that causes the network to operate reliably and continue to grow. In this respect, it is very important to review the proposed system, and in the case ofSymVerse, it is necessary to carefully consider whether the proportion of the key modules and parameters of the system is appropriate. This is because it is difficult to see these details in the current white paper.
The wallet node can be regarded as an individual user of the platform. The work node has a blockchain and receives transactions from the wallet node and propagates to the guarantee node. The SymVerse agreement algorithm is a variant of PBFT and divides the guarantee nodes participating in the agreement into A and B groups.
Nine nodes from the A group are nodes selected by the SymVerse Foundation, and 16 nodes from group B are createdas a result of the guaranteed nodes benchmarking candidate work nodes and replacing four nodes each day. Group B nodes consists of 1 primary, 3 front benches, 8 middle benches, and 4 back benches, with their roles changing every 2 seconds. At present, specific safety tests and speed measurements are underway. Interaction between the various objects will ultimately be viewed as the ultimate measure of the performance of the network, but it is not known whether the above configuration is the best choice, as they have not produced results from either simulations or mathematical optimization.
SymVerse Foundation manages CA nodes in the form of dApp; CA nodes manage user IDs and personal information, as well as provide account recovery function using CA node when a personal key becomes lost. SymVerse contains various types of sub blocks, and these sub blocks have separate block chains. The blockchain for the sub block is connected to the main blockchain using the hash value. The company is also taking steps to reduce the storage space of the main blockchain by using Snapshot blocks. At this time, it is necessary to examine the risks such as the strength of the user anonymity guarantee and the deterioration of decentrality, as these are also not supported by concretely detailed simulations or mathematical proofs. Therefore, there is difficulty in assessing the risks and damage of the system until development is completed and it becomes operational in a large network. The problem of reducing storage space should also be examined based on Shannon's information theory to see if there is a permanent loss of information in the trade-off relationship. SymVerse has not yet opened Mainnet, and SymVerse Foundation has indicated that main block, consensus process, wallet, CA server, and explorer have been completed in anticipation of Mainnet development. It also plans to run an open developer community in November to develop a number of interfaces.
