Autor Cointelegraph By Andrew Levine

Cointelegraph is following the development of an entirely new blockchain from inception to the mainnet and beyond through its series, Inside the Blockchain Developer’s Mind, written by Andrew Levine of Koinos Group.Scalability is a popular topic in blockchain, but few ever explain what we mean by that term. When we at Koinos Group talk about scaling what we mean is scaling to the masses. Creating a blockchain that everyone on Earth can use. That means the blockchain network has to be able to support that level of load, which is typically what people mean when they refer to scalability.User experience mattersBut what they talk about far less is the obvious implication that you must have a user experience that everyone on Earth can find pleasurable. Terrible user experiences are infinitely scalable because there is no demand for bad user experiences and the underlying network resources required to deliver them.Related: Searching deep: The quest for Bitcoin scalability through layer two protocolsThis is demonstrated by the fact that when most projects talk about scaling, they talk about technical implementations like sharding, proof-of-history, or layer 2, which are the solutions that Ethereum is using to solve its scaling challenges.These projects are responding to Ethereum’s scaling constraints by trying to integrate those scaling solutions sooner, but are failing to realize that those solutions only make sense in Ethereum’s context as not only the first general-purpose blockchain but the one with the most developer adoption in the world.Ethereum: The first moverWhen Ethereum was released, it gave developers, for the first time ever, the ability to develop applications on a shared blockchain platform using a programming language very similar to the ones they were already using to build applications; a Turing complete programming language. Compared to the developer experience of building applications on other blockchains, building on Ethereum was a quantum leap that made it faster, easier and cheaper to build decentralized applications. Thanks to this unparalleled user experience, the usage of Ethereum grew at a high rate. Demand for Ethereum’s resources has outstripped supply, which has led to an increase in demand for gas, and a corresponding price increase, making all Ether (ETH) holders very happy.The Ethereum developers and stakeholders do not want to eliminate fees or even necessarily reduce them. That would be like oil producers wanting to reduce the price of oil. If there is surplus demand for their network resources, they don’t care about creating a better user experience, they care about increasing supply (scaling) while maintaining the existing user experience.Related: Ethereum fees are skyrocketing — But traders have alternativesBut that is Ethereum! The 900-pound gorilla of general-purpose blockchains with first mover advantage, incredible developer adoption and unfathomable capital investment. It is a successful platform and its plans for scaling make perfect sense for Ethereum. But they make no sense for platforms that have no usage and no developer adoption.This is why we see so many projects pursuing labor intensive and risky efforts like bridges to Ethereum in an attempt to siphon users off of Ethereum to trigger the growth they need to justify their scaling solutions!Reasoning from analogyBut this is classic reasoning from analogy as opposed to reasoning from first principles; making decisions based on what everyone else is doing instead of focusing on the problem you want to solve and the most efficient path for developing a solution based on fundamental truths. Thinking that the way to scale a new blockchain is sharding because sharding is the way to scale Ethereum is a perfect example of reasoning from analogy.At Koinos Group, we’re approaching this problem from first principles. Scaling to the masses is not about integrating some magical technology that overnight supports everyone and their mother. No technology platform ever goes from zero users to mass adoption overnight. Every platform or product that reaches mainstream adoption only ever achieved that through exponential growth. I’ll repeat that. Every product or platform reaches mass adoption through exponential growth.What that means is that it doesn’t matter how many users or how many transactions your platform or application stack can handle on Day One. That is effectively irrelevant.What matters the most is that your product has some unique value proposition that a small number of early adopters will love, even if the cost is relatively high. Koinos allows people to use decentralized applications for free simply by holding liquid KOIN tokens in their wallets. They don’t have to buy an account or consciously stake their tokens because every liquid KOIN token contains mana that is consumed down when they use the blockchain. As an account’s mana gets consumed, the tokens containing that mana are automatically locked for some time, creating an opportunity cost instead of an explicit fee.Video game experienceThis gives the blockchain a video game-like user experience, instead of the unpleasant UX of every other blockchain. This delivers a fundamentally different, and more pleasant user experience, but it’s not like the whole world is going to want to use Koinos on Day One. Ethereum’s fee-based model is still the dominant paradigm, which is only validated by its many imitators/competitors. It also has an army of developers, token holders and institutional investors advocating for it (and by extension, its fee-based model).Related: Inside the blockchain developers’ mind: Building a free-to-use social DAppOn Day One, a relatively small group (hopefully, not too small) of early adopters looking for the next best thing will begin using Koinos. The mainnet needs to be able to give those people a pleasant user experience, but no more. As those people use the blockchain and discover that it truly has a delightful user experience, they will spread the word, and usage of the blockchain will go up.At a certain point, the usage of Koinos will get high enough that the amount of a user’s tokens getting locked is very high and the new user experience relative to the original user experience might be unacceptable. This is what Koinos hitting its scaling constraints looks like. But bear in mind, the user is still not losing those tokens forever (a fee), they are only sacrificing some opportunity cost, which is an infinitely better user experience.Upgradeability: The ultimate scaling solutionKoinos has to be engineered so that as adoption grows, the right scaling technologies can be integrated at the right time. This is why Koinos is not optimized for any particular scaling solution, but upgradeability in general, making it as easy as possible for new technologies to be added once they have been sufficiently battle-tested. This turns all of the other projects experimenting with scaling technologies prematurely into fertile testing grounds for Koinos!Scaling is not an end goal, it’s a process that unfolds throughout the lifetime of a platform, at least, if the platform is sufficiently upgradeable. If the platform isn’t sufficiently upgradeable then you have to pick the “right” scaling solutions on Day One, even if you don’t need it, but this is more of a reflection of poor upgradeability (and bad engineering) than anything else.This is why I like to say that upgradeability is the ultimate scaling solution.This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.Andrew Levine is the CEO of Koinos Group, a team of industry veterans accelerating decentralization through accessible blockchain technology. Their foundational product is Koinos, a feeless and infinitely upgradeable blockchain with universal language support.

Cointelegraph is following the development of an entirely new blockchain from inception to mainnet and beyond through its series, Inside the Blockchain Developer’s Mind, written by Andrew Levine of Koinos Group.We recently released the third and final version of the Koinos testnet, which is why I want to talk about something few projects like to talk about: Building blockchains is development hell. In this article, I’ll explain why and how other developers can avoid getting stuck in it.At first blush, building a blockchain doesn’t sound so hard. A blockchain is just a combination of well-established cryptographic primitives, which, when properly implemented, allow for the construction of a ledger containing a verifiable history of transactions by a network. The more decentralized the network, the more trustworthy the history. Blockchain “frameworks”In an effort to make building new blockchains easier, other teams have released blockchain “frameworks” that, in theory, should eliminate the need for developers to worry about building the blockchain itself so that they can focus on whatever unique features they want to build into the blockchain. Cosmos, EOSIO and Polkadot’s Substrate are examples of such blockchain frameworks. When our team stopped working on Steem (the world’s first fee-less blockchain), our original intention was to leverage an existing blockchain framework to build a blockchain designed to be as accessible as possible. We had spent four years refining Steem’s fee-less design and figured that, by porting that solution into an existing blockchain framework, we could deliver a blockchain that was far more accessible than any other blockchain in relatively little time.Related: Inside the blockchain developer’s mind: Proof-of-burn blockchain consensusTruly fee-less and general-purposeBut we were surprised to find that none of the existing frameworks allowed us to create the kind of truly feeless user experience we were looking to bring to the market. We didn’t just want to remove fees on a technical level, we wanted to empower developers to build applications that were free to use. They also lacked a number of other features we believed were required to deliver an acceptable developer experience. The power of a general-purpose blockchain stems not from the features the blockchain engineers build into the blockchain but from the features that developers add to that blockchain as smart contracts. This is doubly true for a blockchain framework that should really be the most general-purpose blockchain imaginable since the whole idea is to allow people to build any kind of blockchain they can imagine. And yet, the existing frameworks failed to empower us, one of the most experienced blockchain development teams, in our attempts to build the blockchain we wanted to build in multiple ways.The existing frameworks not only made it impossible for developers to create free-to-use applications, but they also forced developers to learn new and often difficult programming languages and dramatically restricted the rate at which both applications and the blockchain itself could improve. Related: Inside the blockchain developers’ mind: Building a free-to-use social DAppFreeing developersWe wanted to build a blockchain that would free developers to build insanely great applications that ordinary people would love to use. That allowed the developers to work in the programming languages they already knew and loved (what we call “universal language support”); that allowed their applications (and the blockchain itself) to rapidly evolve; and, most importantly, it allowed them to build applications that were free to use. But in order to build that blockchain we first needed a truly general-purpose blockchain framework that would not only allow us to build the blockchain of our dreams but as a natural consequence of being the most general-purpose framework imaginable, should allow anyone to build the blockchain of their dreams.Koinos is that ultimate general-purpose blockchain framework that will serve as the foundation for the ultimate feeless layer 1: Koinos mainnet. The Koinos Blockchain Framework (KBF) is designed to be the simplest blockchain imaginable, containing only those cryptographic primitives necessary to construct a blockchain and the right “system calls” to allow for the widest range of behaviors to be added in-band (without a hard fork) through the uploading of a smart contract.Infinite upgradeabilityThe benefit of this design is infinite upgradeability, but the cost is that it makes getting the system calls right all the more important. Missing a system call or designing it incorrectly would mean having to deal with an otherwise avoidable hard fork. Because hard forks are so time-consuming, political and disruptive, they are the single biggest factor limiting a blockchain’s ability to improve itself, which is ultimately felt by every single developer whose application is built on such a platform. Now we can see how both application and blockchain developers can get trapped in development hell: working in programming languages they aren’t comfortable with, on platforms that force them to incorporate fees and that improve at a snail’s pace. Under these conditions, even minor changes have incredibly high stakes, and we haven’t even factored in those scenarios where there are millions, sometimes billions, of dollars at risk.That is development hell. As the core development team behind the Steem blockchain that had to oversee 23 hard forks, we know this terrain better than almost anyone else, which is why we were so committed to banishing it, well … to hell. Building the Koinos Blockchain Framework from scratch with an entirely novel microservice architecture and getting it to the point where we could launch versions 1 and 2 of the testnet were incredibly challenging. But integrating the feedback we got from those testnets, fixing the bugs they exposed, and finalizing the all-important system calls were a whole other level. But we went through that development hell with the hopes of making it so that others won’t ever have to. HarbingerTestnet v3 is, therefore, more than “just another” version of the testnet. It is the final version of the Koinos Blockchain Framework, which is why we will now refer to the testnet, not by a version number, but by the name: Harbinger. It is the culmination of nearly two years of working, identifying and implementing all the necessary system calls needed to give blockchain developers the ultimate level of freedom and allow their application developers to benefit from a platform that is improving at a more rapid rate than any other blockchain out there. Of course, whenever you’re trying to solve a really important problem, some level of development hell is inevitable. You just want to make sure that you don’t adopt technologies that raise the stakes unnecessarily and that the goal you’re striving for is worth the cost. For us, that goal is not only sparing blockchain developers (including ourselves) from countless hours spent in developer hell but also leveraging this new technology to build Koinos mainnet: the ultimate feeless layer 1 for empowering developers to build insanely great blockchain-based applications. No more development hellThe KBF aims to eliminate development hell by allowing developers to build any blockchain they can imagine simply by writing smart contracts, which is infinitely easier than working in the blockchain code itself. And that’s exactly the position we find ourselves in now. While developing the blockchain framework was incredibly challenging, now that it’s over, all that is needed to complete Koinos mainnet is just two smart contracts: one for our proof-of-burn consensus algorithm and the other for governance.Not only is writing smart contracts far simpler than blockchain development, but this also means that blockchain developers now get to take advantage of the ever-expanding tools that are available to smart contract developers like the AssemblyScript SDK one of our community members built. AssemblyScript doesn’t just produce far more efficient smart contracts than those written in C++ (that was a surprise), it makes smart contract development accessible to JavaScript developers.Since the KBF turns any smart contract developer into a potential blockchain developer, this means that developing custom blockchains will now be accessible to JavaScript developers with even more languages to come, such as Rust. If you’re interested in running Harbinger, we’ve made it insanely easy to run a node so you can be up and running in under five minutes. This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.Andrew Levine is the CEO of Koinos Group, a team of industry veterans accelerating decentralization through accessible blockchain technology. Their foundational product is Koinos, a feeless and infinitely upgradeable blockchain with universal language support.

Cointelegraph is following the development of an entirely new blockchain from inception to mainnet and beyond through its series, Inside the Blockchain Developer’s Mind, written by Andrew Levine of Koinos Group.In my first article in this series, I explained why Ethereum and Steem haven’t been able to deliver a mainstream social decentralized application (DApp). In my second article, I explained how EOS attempted to combine features of both chains but it did so in a way that still required users to buy high-priced random-access memory (RAM) for accounts and smart contracts.In this article, I want to take a different approach to this problem, not based on comparisons to existing platforms but based on first principles. Instead of constraining our imaginations based on the limitations of the earliest attempts at general-purpose blockchains, let’s, instead, look at the problem from the developer’s perspective. What do they need in order to deliver the user experience that mainstream users require? In my previous article, I described this as “fee-less without exceptions.” In other words, they want totally free-to-use applications.Building a free-to-use DApp from first principlesThe very first thing that a user will need to use an application of any kind is an account, so introducing a fee here would immediately create a negative user experience. We want to minimize friction for the user so that we can maximize virality — we certainly don’t want to force them to buy an account. But, we don’t want to solve this problem by simply forcing the developer to pay that account creation cost because this will increase their costs. Related: Gas-free transactions will revolutionize Web3This problem is an easy one because it has already been solved by Bitcoin and Ethereum, both of which allow users to create addresses for free. Thinking from first principles then, if we don’t want developers or end-users to have to pay for accounts, we need a blockchain with addresses that function as accounts. Who pays?Using Bitcoin or Ethereum-style addresses allows us to create accounts without either the end-user or the DApp developer having to eat the fee. Great. But, now we want people to actually use the decentralized application which means that we want them to run a computer program on a decentralized computer and consume some of the computer’s resources. We want to let them do something that will have a real-world cost that someone has to pay. It’s just a matter of who, right? Well, this assumes that there is only one way to charge people.This is precisely where first-principles thinking provides so much value. Fees are the traditional way we charge people for using blockchains, so if we just assume that this is the only solution then the only conceivable option becomes who pays the fee, not whether there is an alternative approach to the problem. Related: The power of cheap transactions: Can Solana’s growth outpace Ethereum?Charging opportunity costTaking people’s money is one way to impose a cost (i.e. decreasing their token balance) but there is another kind of cost: opportunity cost. Taking people’s ability to use their tokens (i.e. their money). If we could create a decentralized system for “charging” people to use the blockchain, not by taking their tokens, but by taking away their ability to use their tokens (for a period of time), then we could allow them to use the blockchain without taking any of their tokens. Not only that, but once that period of time is over, they could choose to use the blockchain more, meaning that they wouldn’t have to constantly be buying more tokens just to be able to continue using the application they love. This would dramatically increase user retention and further maximize growth.Video game experienceWe now have a mechanism for charging users that doesn’t feel like a fee, but our objective is to deliver a mainstream user experience. Requiring people to consciously lock cryptocurrency tokens before they can use an application is not a mainstream user experience. If we can’t require people to consciously lock tokens, that means we need a system that allows people to simply use the blockchain without any thought. All that means is that the system has to decide the size of the opportunity cost instead of the user. Taking this decision out of the hands of the user allows us to design the system so that the size of the opportunity cost is as low as possible, all while maintaining economic sustainability. This gives the user confidence that they are never “overpaying” (even if it is only an opportunity cost) while again maximizing growth by lowering barriers. The cheaper transactions are, the less they feel like fees — the better the user experience — and the faster we can expect the user base to grow.Of course, the user deserves to know how much of their tokens will be locked if they choose to perform the action. What we want is basically a mana bar from a video game. The user should be able to see how much free usage of the blockchain they have based on the liquid tokens that they have in their wallet. When they go to perform some action that consumes blockchain resources, they should be able to see how much of their mana will decrease when they perform the action. If they find that cost acceptable, they simply perform the action, such as minting a nonfungible token (NFT), their mana is consumed and the right amount of tokens are locked for the set period of time. Wouldn’t that be great?The final barrierThere is one last problem: With the system we have described, the end-user still has to have some tokens in their wallet. Generally, that means that they still have to make a purchase (of tokens) before they can use the application. While we still have a pretty good user experience, telling people they have to spend money before they can use an app is a barrier to entry and winds up feeling a whole lot like a fee. I would know, this is exactly what happened on our previous blockchain, Steem. To solve that problem, we added a feature called “delegation” which would allow people with tokens (e.g. developers) to delegate their mana (called Steem Power) to their users. This way, end-users could use Steem-based applications even if they didn’t have any of the native token STEEM. But, that design was very tailored to Steem, which did not have smart contracts and required users to first buy accounts. The biggest problem with delegations is that there was no way to control what a user did with that delegation. Developers want people to be able to use their DApps for free so that they can maximize growth and generate revenue in some other way like a subscription or through in-game item sales. They don’t want people taking their delegation to trade in decentralized finance (DeFi) or using it to play some other developer’s great game like Splinterlands. We want users to be able to use a specific DApp without having to buy tokens first, and, as always, we don’t want the developer to have to spend any money to make this happen. That last part is tough because the traditional way to solve this problem is by designing the smart contract so that the developer can choose to pay the fee instead of the user. But, remember, we’ve already solved this problem because no one is paying a fee for anything, just an opportunity cost. As long as the developer has tokens, they can choose to pay the “mana” that someone needs to use their application.Free for developers?But, what if the developer doesn’t want to buy tokens? What if they have an existing application with a thriving user base that the platform would be lucky to attract? It’s in the best interest of large token holders to attract high quality developers to a platform so they can just do the same thing. The stakeholder could let the developer set them (the stakeholder) as the “payer” of mana for the developer’s smart contracts. The stakeholder isn’t losing any money by doing this but they’re still able to deploy their capital to support value creation and growth, which is great. If the stakeholder provides their mana to a developer whose app adds tremendous value to the platform, then the value of their token holdings will go up. If the developer’s app doesn’t add value, the stakeholder has an incentive to stop providing their mana to that developer and find someone else who can make better use of their mana. We have now figured out not only how to make a DApp free-to-use for the end-user, as an added bonus we have figured out how to make the blockchain free-to-use for developers while giving large stakeholders a way to invest in growth and value creation without sacrificing any of their token holdings.Impossible?But, all of this is just in theory right? Actually, no. What I’ve described here is exactly how we’re building Koinos. In fact, all of these features are already live on our current testnet with the third and final version of the testnet coming soon. If you want to learn more about mana, you can read the white paper here.This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.Andrew Levine is the CEO of Koinos Group, a team of industry veterans accelerating decentralization through accessible blockchain technology. Their foundational product is Koinos, a fee-less and infinitely upgradeable blockchain with universal language support.