Hey yo, what’s the deal with my people who
reside in the Chico Barracks, but if you're
new...not stripes yet, you're just a viewer
of the tube.
My name is Tyler, the host of the crypto channel,
that’s always a party when you would least
expect it.
You know our Antarctic All Nighter.
It’s time for Chico Crypto!
Well, I’m sure many ethereum developer teams,
are staying up all night, thinking about the
results of a certain competition that could
rocket them into the crypto spotlight.
What competition?
The Great Reddit Scaling bake off…
First what exactly is this competition?
Well, it was put on by reddit, in collaboration
with the Ethereum Foundation with one goal
for the teams to accomplish, to scale Ethereum
for reddit’s community points system.
Reddit in May of this year announced the system,
which they coined a new frontier, and from
their explainer, they are a way to own pieces
of communities by contributing work to that
community, within reddit a subreddit.
As we can see below within the “in the blockchain
section” it says “Community Points exist
on the Ethereum blockchain & are stored as
standard ERC-20 tokens.
So initially, they rolled out the points system
to 2 subreddits to test.
r/cryptocurrency which has moon tokens & r/fortniteBR
which has Bricks.
Now the community systems, were launched and
are still existing on the Ethereum Rinkeby
testnet, with plans to move over to the mainnet,
and as we can see from the announcement they
said they would be on the Rinkeby testnet
only through summer 2020.
Well, we are coming on the end of Summer,
September 22nd.
And even if they wanted to launch the community
points for the just 2 subreddits, it would
be unsustainable, with how current ethereum
transactions fees are.
So the competition was announced on the Ethereum
subreddit with all the details…the rules,
how to apply, & who would be accepting the
applications.
In total, 22 contenders and teams submitted
a scaling solution & today, I would like to
go through, in my opinion, the top contenders
& pick who I think is going to bring home
the bacon.
So first, who were the teams that submitted
a solution?
A lot of big names, that I have categorized.
Tokenless w/ no plans for one, tokenless now
but plans for one in the future, and a token.
Let’s begin with the tokenless, and no plans
for one now...that is Abridged, Arbitrum,
Aztec, Connext, Hubble Project, Matter Labs,
and Starkware
Next is the tokenless now, but plans for one.
Those are: Everest, Fuel Labs, Near and Skale
And finally there are the ones with a token.
Those are Celer, Dapp Solutions, Dragonchain,
Matic Network, Meter, Minter, OMG, Raiden,
Solana, Syscoin and Xdai.
What I found to be interesting, was there
was no Cosmos entry, or Ethermint….does
that mean it’s not close to being ready?
But out of the submissions, and breaking them
down into categories...the point I’m trying
to get across, is it could be a big bummer
in the summer for the solutions with a token,
as about 50 percent of the submissions are
tokenless.
So, don’t put all your eggs into a basket
thinking, a coin might win, based on statistics,
there is a 50 percent chance, any coin, won’t
win.
But since we are a cryptocurrency based channel,
talking about Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polkadot,
and the networks tokens, we hope a token wins.
So out of the tokens?
Which one do we think has the best chance
of winning?
Well let’s look into them, and categorize
these on how they are attempting to scale.
We have Plasma & Sidechain from OMG
We have state channels from Raiden
We have a evm compatible sister chain with
xdai based on proof authority
We have proof of stake sidechains with matic
network
We have combination of state channels and
rollup sidechains with Celer
And We have scaling with their own separate
blockchain or hybrid blockchain solution with
Dapp Solutions, Dragonchain, Solana, Meter,
Minter & Syscoin
So based on their solution, we should be able
to theoretically figure out which ones don’t
have a chance as that technology isn’t there
yet or it can’t do what the competition
is asking for.
So what is the competition asking for?
Well from the goal in the announcement, it
says “Our goal is to find a solution that
will support hundreds of thousands of Community
Points users on mainnet today, and can eventually
scale to all of Reddits (430 million monthly
users)”
So, it’s gotta be on the Ethereum mainnet,
which I really don’t get how some of the
projects attempting to push it onto their
blockchain would win.
As EVM compatibility for many of these projects
are really in their initial stages.
So, personally I would count out all the solutions,
attempting to scale with their own separate
blockchain.
Now, let’s go further into the reddit announcement….of
what the Demos for scaling should include.
1.
A live proof of concept showing hundreds of
thousands of transactions 2.Source code 3.
Documentation & 4.
And summary & cost of resource information.
So they want something that is robust obviously,
as they are looking to implement it soon.
So the solution has to have some groundwork
laid behind it.
Which is further reinforced in the section
on usability.
They say “Users shouldn't have to maintain
any extra state/proofs, regularly monitor
activity, keep track of extra keys, or sign
anything other than their normal transactions”
That means it should be very similar to Ethereum...and
then in the section on Interoperabilty they
say the solution should have “Compatibility
with third party apps (wallets/contracts/etc)
is necessary.
“Simple is better.
Learning an uncommon or proprietary language
should not be necessary.
Advanced knowledge of mathematics, cryptography,
or L2 scaling should not be required.
Compatibility with common utilities & toolchains
is expected.
Bonus Points: Show us how it works.
Do you have an idea for a cool new use case
for Community Points?
Build it!
So, that tells us a whole lot, as a ton of
these third party apps, and contracts aka
smart contracts need to scale as well.
It can’t just be for just the transferring
of tokens, so in my opinion, it can’t be
statechannels, from Raiden & it can’t be
Plama from OMG as scaling smart contracts
is only in the r&d phase.
That leaves us 3, of the tokens, I think could
make it.
Celer, Matic Network & xdai.
Now Celer’s submission is good, but it's
really based on State channel technology right
now, the full scalability, for ethereum smart
contracts comes with the launch of their Hybrid
PoS-Rollup Sidechain, but as we can see from
a recent blog post of it in February, they
don’t expect to mainnet launch until q2
2020.
So much further off, than what Reddit needs
right now.
So that leaves us Matic and xDai.
And here is a nice breakdown of the two chains,
we will go over the parts immpoprtant for
the competition.
xdai is a stable chain, while matic is volatile,
that is important, as paying for transactions
could be predictable, while on matic it would
be unknown and vary.
Token structure is dual for xdai with multi-staking
capabilities, and matic is single token for
staking and transactions on their chain.
That’s important, as they are looking for
the option to create mass amounts of tokens
on the chain.
Interoperability for xdai is 100 percent with
the ethereum mainnet, and no waiting period.
Matic has partial for arbitrary data, and
a 7 day waiting period for Matic to Eth transfers.
That right there is a big bummer, the interoperability
with ethereum.
I’m no developer, but you would think, for
their full system to work, you would need
full interoperability, especially if third
party wallets and apps are to use it.
And the waiting, is the hardest part.
The token bridges xdai have built are fully
functional and have been for some time, no
waiting.
With matic, sending ethereum or erc20’s
to the matics layer has no wait, but coming
back, there is a 7 day wait as of right now.
Now Block times for xdai are 5 seconds, with
70tps, with bidirectionsal scalability.
Matic is 1 second blocktimes, and 7000tps
with horizontal scalability.
Matic takes the cake on that, there is no
doubt about it.
So let’s compare their submissions a bit
deeper.
Where were the tokens issued?
The test tokens??
Going to blockscout, on the xdai token explorer,
of course they have the reddit scaling test
moons and test bricks on chain, they demonstrated
it could be done on the xdai MAINNET.
But they also have hundreds of other tokens,
being issued on the chain, from the likes
of some interesting camps, on page 2...honey
from 1hive, aragon dev team, ChinaDao, Aragon
for China on xdai, Powerpool USDC a supposed
matic team, and even Compound, and yearn finance.
That’s on the mainnet.
Now going to Matic’s submission thread,
the team as we can see issued the tokens on
their testnet Mumbai, not the mainnet.
Hmmm interesting, and what I also found interesting
was matic’s blockchain explorer, as you
can see it looks oh so similar to xdai’s...but
no token search function, unfortunately...why
does it look so similar...the same?
Well as we can see from Matic’s github,
it was forked from the xdai team, as blockscout
and POA are them.
Now I wanna finish this up with, what they
said regarding the Bonus points.
They said….
Show us how it works.
Do you have an idea for a cool new use case
for Community Points?
Build it!
So Bonus points if an actual use cas was built...well
Matic had a checklist of what they had accomplished,
and as we can see, that is TBD and not checked
off.
But as we can see from Xdai’s Gitbook submission,
and walkthrough, they have the Bonus right
there, with xmoon, a video on the xmoons exchange,
and the coming game built with the tokens….all
live on the mainnet right now.
Yes, going to xdai’s explorer, we can see
their is the moons on xdai token, xmoon..tokens,
and these are taking the testnet moons, from
Ethereum Rinkby users are earning on r.crypto
subreddit, and creating a scalable economy
for them...before they are even live on the
mainnet.
If that’s not bonus points, I don’t know
what is.
So obviously, I think it’s going to be xdai,
matic is close, but they are not there yet
in my opinion.
I may be wrong, but this last piece leads
me to believe it’s xdai.
So back to the posting, the submissions were
being sent to a certain person.
From the submissions sections they say “To
submit your proposal: Please make a separate
post in r/Ethereum with your submission.
Then either tag u/jarins and u/EvanVanNess
in a comment or send us a PM with the link
to your post.
User Jarins, is a top reddit Admin, who works
with many of the subreddits, taking the lead
on spreading this... while user Evan Van Ness,
is the one connected to Ethereum, as he has
major ties to Consensys and the foundation.
So Jarin, isn’t going to know much about
who is going to win, Evan would...what has
Evan recently said?
Well just 6 days ago he posted this on his
youtube channel in regards to Ethereum winning
the blockchain wars.
Let’s listen in…
Statechannels won’t work, rollups won’t
work.
The only option is xdai for scale.
From the person who received the submission.
Cheer’s viewers I’ll see you next time!
