Tech Tuesday Update #8: A Summary Of Last Week's Development

Things move fast at Komodo Platform. That’s why the Komodo team has decided to release a weekly briefing to cover all of the progress the Dev Team is making. This series of posts is called the Tech Tuesday Updates.

In case you’ve missed a previous edition and want to catch up, you can find all the previous Tech Tuesday updates here.

Custom Consensus Framework - what is on mainnet today?

Komodo's Custom Consensus framework, the smart UTXO model described in TT #7, has been in development and testing at Komodo. They won’t go live until next notary node election hard fork, but there are already 3 live CCs in action with a 4th and most ambitious soon to be launched!

Verus Coin - solved the nothing at stake problem that exists in proof of stake systems - in simple terms, Komodo's custom consensus framework allows for consensus rules to be customized - in this case, to check that the block reward winner wasn't cheating.

KMDice - a demonstration of the DiceCC which makes an example of how to make challenge-response style communication with the use of provably fair system. More info down the page.

ChatDapp - aka TrollBox. This is a working dapp from the STAKED developers. Any blockchain with Komodo's custom consensus framework enabled can use this chat dApp. The ChatDapp uses an Oracle custom consensus module to create on-chain data.

Marmara - a project with an ecosystem involving a region in Turkey. Turkey is in a unique position to take Komodo's custom consensus framework and integrate with the country’s post-dated cheque payments system which accounts for $200B (billion!) USD in GDP. Further developments with such a system on the blockchain allow for “partial cheques” by tokenizing these cheques, and then splitting the tokens. As James Lee Komodo lead dev and Marmara advisor has said,

“Also assets CC does the vast majority of the post dated check linked list handling simply via tokencreate and tokentransfer. It is possible to make it so is a tree instead of a linked list, so the entire balance wont need to be signed to the next person. basically utxos and this is already built in. so it would be an improvement over the paper version as there is no practical way to do partials on paper checks”

Flexible cross-chain contract technology!

KMDICE - A Provably Fair PoW Blockchain Dice Game

The first mineable PoW blockchain dice game was released. The announcement is on bitcoin talk forums. Some documentation is available on how to play here.

KMDICE game uses the dice custom consensus module. This CC module is an example of a blockchain challenge-response mechanism. Similar mechanisms can be used for other types of games or quizzes.

The dice game is probably fair because the dealer and the player both send random numbers that are hidden (by hashing) to create the game’s random number. Information about provable fair mechanism is here.

The use of a PNRG shows how one can re-use non-blockchain software development techniques to create new blockchain consensus rules - and apply them into dApps.

There is a windows GUI available for this new technology, with ecosystem developers working on other casino-style games. To make GUIs to games, please join our discord for information on becoming a dapp developer.

Supply Chain Blockchain Adoption - How Do Business Partners Integrate?

Last week in TT #7, we introduced some research into using oracle data for supply chain solutions. In a quick explanation let's try and explain how to integrate with business partners who do not have a blockchain logistics service in operation.

In a coindesk article, IBM’s HyperLedger was used to build a platform designed for shipping such that shipping company Maersk's rivals will act as "trust anchors" and run full blockchain nodes on the network.

One organization launching a blockchain is good for internal processes, but this leads to further questions when integrating and collaborating with business partners to run more efficiently. Logistics companies use multiple carriers and freight-forwarders, and the value proposition involves managing cargo and inventory across all of them.

How can we integrate between different logistic systems?

Gateways/Oracles between old systems and new systems. As one part of the industry moves, the others may not - so there needs to be bridges built. These bridges are what we call Oracles. They turn off-chain data into on-chain data, so the blockchain system can carry on processing transactions with verified input from an Oracle.

Now that we have a bridge built between our laggard mainframe using logistics business partner, we need a way to keep track of it in our supply chain dApp. In order to not lose “their” parcels through the logistics process, we create a gateway transaction so that their oraclized parcel can move through any systems we use on the blockchain - and the verifiability is continued against this gateway to the oraclized parcel.

When it comes out the other end, a transaction to unlock the gateway transaction from the oracle data can be used so the end sum of parcels leaves no remaining stale data.

One of Komodo’s testers, TonyL has created a TUI (text user interface) for developers of such solutions to experiment with. A short demo of it in action is viewable on youtube.

Blockchain Agnostic Double Spend Protection For Crypto Exchanges

Once a blockchain has integrated delayed proof of work (dPoW) into their codebase, they are protected by bitcoin’s enormous mining infrastructure. Currently, bitcoin forks, litecoin forks and zcash forks have all been used on mainnets.

Komodo notarizes other blockchains onto itself and then onto bitcoin’s network, effectively making a double spend attempt requiring 3 blockchains to be 51% attacked.

dPoWConf is helpful for exchanges and for users who prefer security. This will work automatically for native mode for KMD or any other assetchains. SPV mode does not have this. Exchanges can credit deposit when they see more than 1 confirmation to make sure the tx is secure and 51% can't change it.

- 0 confirmations mean, tx is not confirmed yet

- 1 confirmation means this tx is confirmed on the network, but not dPoW'd yet (explorer may show different block confirmations until the next notarization happens on the respective chain, nothing to worry about)

- any other confirmation number means the tx is secure with dPoW

https://docs.komodoplatform.com/komodo/dPOW-conf.html

Custom Consensus Framework & dPoW Pull Requests From New Developers

Thank you to these developers how are making contributions to the best framework in blockchain technology advancement. Things like streaming payments, cross-chain contracts, and on-chain oracle data to help move to systems of verifiable non-custodial integrity.

Interested in GUI dApps development? Discord's #cc_gui channel will be where most of the work will take place in the coming weeks.

Thank you Komodo (& ecosystem) developers, what an exciting week!