Introducing ABEYCHAIN 3.0

Sep 1, 2022

Project update:

ABEYCHAIN 2.0 was launched in April 2021. After more than a year of development, there are more than 170,000 addresses on the chain performing in excess of 29 million on-chain transactions.  Moreover, the number of average daily transactions  exceeds 150,000/day from more than 30,000 daily active addresses. The current on-chain TVL (total value locked) is above $26 million USD. 

 

The ABEY Foundation is proud to introduce ABEYCHAIN 3.0 on September 1, 2022.

With this upgrade, our consensus design provides greater efficiency, consistency, liveness, transaction finality and security than ever before. The primary focus of ABEYCHAIN is to advance these concepts and to build a blockchain that is uniquely designed for the ABEY community. running smart contracts in a hybrid cloud infrastructure and usage of existing volunteer computing protocols, we have also adopted the idea of data sharding and speculative transactions.

 

Upcoming changes:

In order to shift to DPoS consensus, a hard fork is set to launch at snail block number 73,500. The expected launch date is Sep. 1st, 2022.

With this monumental event taking place soon, it is important to recognize the key reasons of this transition:

 

  1. The DPoS committee will be on a rotating basis in order to prevent corruption in a timely manner.

The DPoS committee is responsible for transaction validation, and staking is responsible for choosing/electing the committee members according to some rules we have derived and re-defined.

 

  1. Parallel Transaction execution implemented to increase throughput.

The traditional transaction execution mechanism reads transactions one by one from the block – which is not performed optimally as transactions can only be executed sequentially. In practical applications, however, splitting unrelated transactions and executing them in parallel will greatly optimize execution efficiency.

 

In ABEY 3.0, we adopt these specific steps in the optimization process:

  • Preparing: convert all transactions to “message” type;
  • Grouping: group transactions according to associated address;
  • Executing: execute each transaction group in parallel;
  • Check for conflicts: check whether the transaction groups are in conflict according to returned results. If there is a conflict, roll back the conflicting transactions, then regroup and re-execute; and
  • Collect results: collect the execution results of each group, update the tree, and generate the state root.

 

With the above methods, all transaction-related issues in parallel transactions can be resolved. It is now feasible to accurately group and execute transactions in parallel to improve transaction execution efficiency.

 

  1. The shift to DPoS sets the stage for“sharding”to vastly improve throughput.

This innovation will significantly improve the scability of the ABEYCHAIN network.

Sharding allows the ABEY blockchain to be broken up into smaller pieces called “shards.” These shards act as semi-autonomous fragments of the main blockchain and can process transactions on their own. With sharding, ABEYCHAIN’s  TPS (transactions per second) is estimated to increase to 100,000.

 

  1. DPoS is much more environmentally friendly.

As opposed to POW, which relies on computer power, DPoS greatly reduces the energy consumption because the blockchains rely on collateral to achieve consensus. The ABEY Foundation estimates that a purely DDPoS ABEYCHAIN blockchain could use approximately 90% less energy than the PoW + DPoS system it was previously built on.

This is good news for current ABEY holders (including institutions with strong ESG mandates) who have reservations about being associated with an asset class that has become synonymous with excessive energy usage. Once it is demonstrated that the ABEYCHAIN operates on a significantly lower energy consumption after the transition to DPoS, it is possible  that venture capitalists and  institutional investors will be interested in attracted to investing in the project.

 

Changes to ABEY’s tokenomics and reward distribution:

As a result of this upgrade, the total ABEY token supply will decrease from the current supply of 3,000,000,000 down to 1,419,297,400.

All future ABEY tokens will be generated as DPoS staking rewards after September 1, 2022. Reward distribution will halve every 4 years, until the year 2040.

 

Conclusions & future directions.

We formally introduced the ABEY 3.0 DPoS Consensus protocol and its implementation along with plausible speculations on September 1, 2022. Below are various new concepts we will detail very soon.

  • We intend to support sharding for the DPoS committee nodes, for scalability.
  • We intend to address the storage issue for high TPS public chains and introduced a method that seamlessly merge transaction process with decentralized data storage.
  • A intend to implement a compensation infrastructure, which accounts for node configuration non-uniformity (different CPU/memory/network bandwidth in the node pool), to be a part of the consensus, thus speeding up transactions.
  • The resulting smart contracts execution would only happen in AVM (BFT node).

项目更新：

ABEYCHAIN 2.0 主网于 2021 年 4 月正式上线，经过一年多的持续发展，目前链上的地址总数已超过 17万个，交易总数已超过 2900 万笔。此外，日均交易量已超过15万笔。每日活跃地址超过三万个。当前链上 TVL（总锁定价值）已超过 5400 万美元。

 

ABEY 基金会已于 2022 年 9 月 1 日推出 ABEYCHAIN 3.0版本。

通过这次升级，我们的共识设计将享有比以往更高的效率、一致性、灵活性、以及交易的安全性。 ABEY链将致力于不断着重推进这些概念，并构建一个为ABEY社区而服务的大型生态系统。ABEY链还将采用数据分片和交易预测的理念，在混合云基础设施中运行智能合约，并使用现有的志愿者计算协议来实现上述的目标。

 

即将到来的升级：

ABEYCHAIN将在73,500 号蜗牛区块处启动硬分叉，从而转向100% DPoS 共识。硬分叉预计发布日期为 2022 年 9 月 1 日。

具体来讲，转向100% DPoS共识能够使ABEYCHAIN获得如下升级：

 

  1. DPoS委员会将采用轮值制，以便及时防止不当行为。

DPoS委员会负责链上交易验证的工作，质押的过程则将决定和重新定义一些规则/委员会成员的资格。

 

  1. 加入并行交易以增加链上吞吐量

传统交易执行方案是：从待共识的区块逐条读出交易，执行完每一笔交易后，状态机都会迁移至下一个状态，直到所有交易都被串行执行完成。

很明显，这种交易执行方式对性能并不友好。即使两笔交易没有交集，也只能按照先后顺序依次执行。在实际应用中，如果能将每笔不相关的交易拆开来并行执行，则会大幅度优化执行效率。

 

在 ABEY 3.0中，我们在优化交易效率的过程中采用了这些具体步骤：

  • Prepare – 把所有交易转成message类型；
  • Group – 根据关联地址分组；
  • Execute – 并行执行各个交易组；
  • Check for conflict – 根据返回的结果检查交易组是否冲突，如果冲突，则就滚冲突的交易并重新分组并行执行，
  • Collect results – 收集各组执行结果，更新trie，并生成state root

 

通过这个过程，就能够解决可能遇到的交易关联的问题。以及可以准确进行分组并并行执行交易，提高交易执行效率。

  1. DPoS 共识更加环保

由于 DPoS 区块链依靠权益证明（即质押）来完成共识机制，而不是像 PoW 能源密集型的方式，因此ABEYCHAIN的能源消耗将相对升级前大大降低。 ABEY 基金会估计，与目前的的 PoW + DPoS 混合共识相比，纯粹的 DPoS ABEYCHAIN 区块链可以减少大约 90% 的能源消耗。

另外，这对于具有高 ESG （环境、社会、治理）要求的大型机构来说是个好消息，这些机构已经对多种过度耗费能源的资产类别持保留态度。当ABEYCHAIN 转向 DPoS 的升级被证明能够大幅降低能耗以及提高处理效率后，ABEYCHAIN预计会在不久后吸引大量的投资者进入。

 

  1. 向 DPoS 的迁移也为“分片”（sharding）技术奠定了基础，以更大地提高交易吞吐量

这项创新有望显著提高 ABEYCHAIN 网络的延展能力。

分片技术允许 ABEY 区块链的内部能够被解构成更小的部分，称为“分片”（shards）。这些分片是主区块链的半自治部分，它们可以自行处理更多交易（并行处理）。通过引入分片技术，ABEYCHAIN 的 TPS（每秒交易数量）预计会增加到100,000。

 

ABEY代币经济以及挖矿过程的变化

由于此次升级，ABEY 代币的总供应量将从目前的 3,000,000,000 减少到 1,419,297,400。

所有未来的 ABEY 代币都将在 2022 年 9 月 1 日之后以 DPoS 质押奖励的方式生成。奖励分配将每 4 年减半一次，直到 2040年结束奖励发放。

 

结论和未来方向

  • 我们已于 2022 年 9 月 1 日正式介绍了 ABEY 3.0 DPoS 共识协议。以下是即将很快进行详细介绍的新概念：
  • 我们将支持 DPoS委员会节点中融入分片技术，以实现更大的链上扩展性。
  • 我们将解决高 TPS 公链的存储问题，并引入一种将交易过程与去中心化数据存储无缝融合的方法。
  • 解决节点配置不均匀性（节点池中不同的 CPU/内存/网络带宽）的补偿基础设施将成为ABEY链共识的一部分，从而加快交易速度。
  • 因此，智能合约的执行只会发生在AVM（BFT 节点）中。