MeerContract Why Cross-Chain
Those who are familiar with Qitmeer know that the highlight of Qitmeer’s smart contract is the support of cross-chain. Quite a few people from our community think that Qitmeer does not support smart contracts, thinking that cross-chain is to build an extra private chain of EtherChannel dedicated to the execution of smart contracts and then Qitmeer main chain through the cross-chain protocol and contract chain. Smart contracts have been one of the most concerned topics in the community.
The first thing to answer is why a cross-chain smart contract solution is needed. To answer this question, we first have to ask what problems exist with smart contracts today. We believe that the two biggest problems are the standards for smart contracts are not unified and the performance of smart contracts does not meet the user standards.
Let’s start with the issue of standards. It may be true that the current blockchain ecosystem has a dominant smart contract solution like Ether, but there are still many competitive public chains with different smart contract standards, such as EOS, Solana, etc. There are still many problems with blockchain infrastructure, such as high fees, low transaction throughput, uncertain regulatory policies and other core issues that are yet to be solved. Ether itself is constantly being improved, so it is hard to say that Ether will remain dominant in the long run. Therefore, the Qitmeers’ team is very cautious in whether to take this solution of deeply integrating Ether smart contract system with emerging public chains and if there is a much better smart contract system than Ether in the future, there is a dilemma of whether to upgrade or not.
Completely redesigning a set of smart contracts requires a high cost and as far as we can see the smart contract solutions represented by Ether are already very rich, instead of reinventing the wheel, we should actively embrace the whole ecosystem. Many emerging smart contract systems are not redesigned with virtual machines and scripting systems for the characteristics of smart contracts like Ether but rather take the less risky option of integrating high-level language compilers. For example, EoS, developed in C++, has an integrated WebAssembly virtual machine that can parse C++ code while Solana, developed in rust, has a smart contract that can directly parse rust code and NervOS’ Capsule framework similarly supports rust language development. In addition to directly integrating a high-level language virtual machine that can use existing open-source compiler resources to quickly implement smart contract systems, the powerful expressiveness of high-level languages is also more conducive to developers to efficiently implement smart contracts but the overly free expressiveness of high-level languages also poses a challenge to the development of stable smart contracts.
Qitmeer’s proposed cross-chain smart contract is a very flexible solution that allows Qitmeer to fully embrace the entire blockchain ecosystem. Regardless of how smart contracts evolve and which project eventually becomes the final standard, Qitmeer only needs to implement a set of cross-chain protocols that can be migrated over. In addition to flexibility, development efficiency is also a very important consideration and Qitmeer can devote more energy to polishing cross-chain protocols rather than reinventing a smart contract system allowing mainstream smart contract design to better serve the Qitmeer ecosystem.
Talking more about the performance of smart contracts. We believe many people still remember the congestion of Ether caused by the ICO and crypto cats of many star projects. The decentralization of the public chain will lead to each transaction being verified by the nodes of the whole network, so a single burst DApp may cause congestion of the whole public chain. Improving the scaling capacity of the public chain itself is definitely a thought, but there is a contradiction between scaling capacity and decentralization here. So if Qitmeer insists on scaling capacity without sacrificing security and decentralized classical blockchain values, it will be constrained by physical limits such as network bandwidth or node computing power, while the smart contract applications of the network are unlimited.
Therefore, in the long run, even if the network is expanded, it cannot carry smart contract applications, not to mention that the complexity and number of smart contracts in the future will far exceed the current one, so it is more reasonable to adopt off-chain solutions. If the chain interacting with the main chain is considered as a side chain of the main chain, the cross-chain can also be considered as an off-chain scaling solution. Contracts can be executed on the interacting chain, so they do not affect the performance of the main chain.
The cross-chain smart contract solution allows Qitmeer to embrace the entire blockchain ecosystem and solves the hidden problem of smart contracts dragging down the public chain. But there are various solutions for cross-chain smart contracts, such as the way to build a private chain mentioned at the beginning. In the next issue, we will continue to explore the problems of such solutions and how Qitmeer’s cross-chain smart contracts solve them.
About Qitmeer
Qitmeer is the next-generation public chain based on BlockDAG which is dedicated to serving the ecosystem of Islamic Finance, ethical finance, and socially responsible investment, thereby enhancing financial inclusion and creating social impact.
In contrast to the competition model, BlockDAG’s collaboration model in the mining achieves a desirable balance of typical blockchain metrics among the security, openness, fairness, and scalability.
Qitmeer adopts a classic POW consensus and UTXO data model and designs a unique asset issuing mechanism which requires the reserve of native currency, which is in line with core ethical financial values.
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