Space Invaders – One blockchain’s battle against state bloat
This is one of the eleven shortlisted articles from the 1st Ed. Nervos Community Writing Contest. If you like this article, vote for it with a like and RT ❤️!
Author: @cryptografeen
Note: This article solely represents the author's personal views. The content here should not be taken as investment advice. We welcome any comments, suggestions, or corrections of errors.
One of the success stories of the past 12 months has been the rise of the Ethereum side-chain, Polygon (formerly Matic). Its success can be attributed to its low transaction settlement fees, and a whole host of side chains have appeared promising higher transactions speeds and lower transaction costs. These have attracted a lot of attention in the crypto community, but there is a larger issue at play which is the fundamental reasoning behind these L2s in the first place – state bloat.
Users of Ethereum’s network have suffered the effects of state bloat, causing Ethereum to become so slow that it hampers development on the network. The side chains that are evolving from Ethereum will, in time, also suffer from state bloat, and so a further layer will need to be built. Each layer brings with it cheaper transactions, but only cheaper in comparison to the platform they are built upon. The more the network is used, the less attractive it becomes for retail investors. The more the network is used, the more state the network is consuming and the larger the network occupies.
This is where the beauty of Nervos’ architecture is realized. The real “eureka” moment, with a developer mindset, is the ability to build applications on Nervos with the removal of risk. Nervos’ “Common Knowledge Base” (CKB) gives developers the ability to own space on the permissionless layer of Nervos. One CKB represents one byte of space. Should a developer create a dApp on Nervos, and that dApp becomes obsolete over time, the developer has the ability to reclaim used space on the network. That developer could decide they wish to use their locked CKB in a different way. No longer is that space on the network tied to the application developed on it originally.
I believe that Nervos is to blockchain what virtualization was to computing. Traditionally servers were built with a shelf life. Traditionally server acquisition was a laborious process that could take months. Virtualization ensured that servers could be spun up in seconds and, more importantly, the memory, CPU, and storage that the server occupied was reclaimable & reusable. This means that, unlike Ethereum, there is no-ever expanding state that will slow all nodes and, while CKB is deployed in the building of dApps, it is essentially a method of holding CKB long term, so a developer sitting on a piece of obsolete code is incentivized to release this CKB. The common knowledge base not only affords developers the right to space on layer one but also makes that space more valuable over time. And all that without mentioning interoperability!
On a personal level, the bull market and bear market trends don’t bother me right now. I am stacking as much CKB as I can in the hope of becoming a virtual landlord, renting out space on the Nervos network in the future, or becoming an angel investor, donating CKB to the next generation of entrepreneurs in need of some space to rent. All the while, I will be looking to acquire more CKB in the process. The more one considers the potential applications, the more sense it makes to hold and stake in the Nervos DAO, where your CKB staked are protected from secondary issuance. Nervos has done a phenomenal job battling the space invaders; the blockchain world simply doesn’t know it’s at risk yet.