Archive for the ‘Smart Contracts’ Category

Announcing The Launch Of VORJ, Vechain’s ‘Web3-as-a-Service … – Medium

Since launch, Vechains focus has been building technologies that solve obstacles impeding mass adoption of blockchain technology. Today, one of the most important pieces of technology in this mission officially launches VORJ.

With it, vechain launches a platform that almost entirely abstracts the blockchain development process away, opening up Web3 building to the masses, regardless of technical expertise.

VORJ is a no-code Web3-as-a-Service platform that enables anyone to create, deploy and interact with smart contracts on the VechainThor blockchain you no longer need to understand solidity to get involved.

Head to VORJ, create a free account to start deploying digital assets on the VechainThor blockchain!

The ethos of VORJ is simple: Make blockchain easy.

VORJ combines the familiar Web2 user experience with the ability to create Web3 digital assets from just a few clicks. Users dont even need to manage crypto assets to pay for transaction costs as fees are handled by VORJ itself, eliminating a key barrier to entry.

As the VechainThor blockchain is Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible, VORJ offers secure and battle tested OpenZeppelin smart contracts, considered the industry standard.

The VORJ beta release currently offers the creation of fungible ERC-20 contracts or non-fungible tokens (NFT) ERC-721 contracts on the VORJ frontend while the VORJ Application Programmable Interface (API) offers users a wider selection of token standards.

VORJ can seamlessly integrate with existing projects, or help users create entirely new ones from scratch. Importantly, by ensuring Ethereum-standard compatibility, contracts deployed by VORJ can interoperate across EVM blockchains, opening up a world of possibilities for DApp or DeFi builders looking to take advantage of VechainThors enterprise-grade technical features.

The initial version of the VORJ frontend supports the most popular token standards, the fungible ERC-20 and the non-fungible ERC-721 token standards. Meanwhile, the VORJ backend supports an extended range of token standards, ERC-1155, ERC-4626, UUPS and the vechain native standards VIP-180 and VIP-210.

Other than smart contracts VORJ also offers:

Blockchain data APIs offering oversight of current and historical block information, details about transactions and smart contract information

NFT APIs providing aggregated data for NFT collections and tokens

Carbon APIs calculates the carbon costs associated with using given contracts or addresses on VechainThor

Contract Push Notifications offering users the ability to receive real-time information and updates about events on smart contracts, triggered by on-chain events

Transaction executor a module for creating transactions on the VechainThor blockchain

Contract deployer deploys user-configured smart contracts to VechainThor

With many more features to be added.

Visit VORJ, sign up for a FREE account and start deploying Web3 assets with ease!

This initial launch version of VORJ is, of course, just the start. VORJ will come to play a key role in adoption of the VechainThor blockchain, providing a gateway for users and businesses to easily embrace the Web3 revolution.

For example, VORJ will form the backbone of our upcoming Sustainability-as-a-Service ecosystem, detailed in our recently published sustainability whitepaper, co-developed in partnership with Boston Consulting Group.

Our Blockchain Biospheres approach to sustainability represents a milestone in the application of blockchain technology, comprising interconnected ecosystems of cross-industry companies and users driving sustainable behaviour through trustless data (summarised here).

Launching initially for free, VORJ will later launch paid subscription tiers for business or users requiring greater scales of usage. VORJ will always retain a free tier of usage.

With VORJ, vechain takes another great leap towards fulfilling its role as the foundational layer of blockchain mass adoption.

Almost all aspects of modern data infrastructure will be enhanced by integrating the trustless, transparent and vastly more efficient nature of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) into their management processes, whether for sustainability, supply chains and beyond.

Time and time again, vechain demonstrates its aptitude at solving adoption hurdles and bringing tools to market that neatly address real world needs. The VechainThor public blockchain sits among the elite of viable blockchain protocols, buoyed by billion-dollar global channel partners, Fortune 500 clientele and real world use cases implemented live and at scale.

Through VORJ, vechain is further cementing its place at the heart of the future multi-trillion dollar blockchain economy.

Vechain, headquartered in San Marino, Europe, is the curator of VechainThor, a world leading smart contract platform spearheading the real world adoption of blockchain technology.

Through leveraging the capabilities of trustless data (information without intermediaries), smart contracts and IoT technologies, VechainThor has enabled solutions across a wide array of fields. Vechain now turns its attention to the greatest challenge of all building digital ecosystems to drive sustainability and digital transformation at global scale.

Visit https://www.vechain.org to learn more.

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Announcing The Launch Of VORJ, Vechain's 'Web3-as-a-Service ... - Medium

T. Rowe Price & Others to Test Public Blockchains – FTF News

Grygo is the chief content officer for FTF & FTF News.

While the hype surrounding blockchain technology cooled long ago, the hope remains that it will yield trading technology breakthroughs.

With that hope in mind, T. Rowe Price Associates, WisdomTree, Wellington Management, and Cumberland are an initial cohort of financial services firms participating in a test of public blockchain infrastructure. They will explore the benefits of on-chain trade execution and settlement for applications and assets, officials say.

The cohort will be using a testnet, which is an instance of a blockchain powered by the same or a newer version of the underlying software, to be used for testing and experimentation without risk to real funds or the main chain, according to a quick definition found via Wikipedia.

In particular, the participants will be working with the Spruce subnet/testnet from the Evergreen division of Avalanche, a smart contracts platform company that offers its consensus protocol, a subnet infrastructure, and a HyperSDK toolkit to launch customized blockchain solutions.

The Spruce testnet is meant to enable buy- and sell-side institutions to engage with public blockchain infrastructure in a low-risk, low-barrier-to-entry manner. Using valueless tokens allows institutional participants to experience the full functionality of Avalanches Subnet architecture without putting capital at risk, according to Avalanche officials.

In a prepared statement, Mark Garabedian, director, digital assets and tokenization at Wellington Management, says the Avalanche Subnets represent a potential settlement solution that enables financial transactions with enhanced operational efficiencies, reduced risks, and regulatory compliance without creating liquidity islands or reduced interoperability.

For the testnet experiments, institutions wallets are issued non-transferable tokens (NTTs) indicating theyve passed KYC/KYB checks; in addition, their wallet addresses are embedded in an allow-list, which monitors access at the chain level. Smart contract deployers who have integrated key infrastructure and applications also undergo the onboarding process for their activity on Spruce, officials say.

Participating in the Avalanche Spruce testnet presents a valuable opportunity to deepen our understanding and analysis of smart contract technology and the potential applications of public, permissioned blockchains in financial markets, says Blue Macellari, head of digital assets strategy at T. Rowe Price Associates in a prepared statement.

Institutional partners will use DeFi applications on Spruce to execute foreign exchange (FX) and interest rate swaps, with other areas in active research and development, according to Avalanche Evergreen officials.

Future phases of Spruce will welcome additional third-party applications, assets, and processes, including the exploration of tokenized equity and credit issuance, trading, and fund management. Institutions will be key in providing ongoing feedback about subnet architecture, integrations, and capabilities in order to ensure a successful and scalable mainnet implementation, according to Avalanche Evergreen.

We believe tokenization and blockchain will play an important role in financial services going forward, said Will Peck, head of digital assets at WisdomTree in a statement.

Avalanche Spruce provides an opportunity to further explore the potential efficiencies and benefits of on-chain trading and settlement with other financial institutions. We are looking forward to experimenting in this EVM-based [Ethereum Virtual Machine] testing environment, Peck says.

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T. Rowe Price & Others to Test Public Blockchains - FTF News

Venom Blockchain: A Scalable and Secure Solution for the Future of … – Captain Altcoin

Home De-Fi Venom Blockchain: A Scalable and Secure Solution for the Future of Decentralized Finance

Venom Foundation is a blockchain-related firm that has received licensing from the Abu Dhabi Global Market. As a decentralized network, Venom operates under the jurisdiction of the ADGM and has the ability to issue utility tokens.

Venom Foundation is licensed to operate a blockchain by the ADGM which is compliant with international law and regulations, a financial center in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates that operates as an international financial hub.

This blockchain is compliant with regulations, making it an attractive option for investors and financial services firms. Several companies have developed decentralized applications and protocols on the Venom blockchain, and it has the potential to become a bridge for the adoption of central bank digital currencies in the Middle East, North Africa, and globally.

According to the Venom Foundation, their mission is to promote the widespread adoption of blockchain technology. They offer innovative technologies and frameworks that adhere to the rule of law and create a secure environment for a broad range of users, from retail customers to institutions and sovereign nations.

Venom uses a Proof of Stake consensus type, with an initial implementation using a BFT-based consensus protocol with four phases for reaching consensus. The protocol assumes that at least of all network validators are honest, and a collusion of more than of validators can result in a network halt or corruption.

The Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus algorithm is designed to enable a distributed network to reach consensus even when some of the nodes in the network fail to respond or respond with incorrect information.

The Byzantine Generals Problem is the fundamental problem that BFT addresses, which is about how to ensure consensus among a group of nodes in the network when some of them are faulty or malicious. BFT is derived from this problem and aims to reduce the influence of faulty nodes by employing collective decision-making by both correct and faulty nodes.

Overall, Venom is a powerful blockchain platform that offers several advantages and features that make it an attractive choice for businesses and developers.

Venoms architecture is designed to be asynchronous, with a dynamic sharding and a heterogeneous multi-blockchain platform. The platform utilizes a masterchain/workchain architecture to address horizontal scalability issues.

Venom employs the Threaded Virtual Machine (TVM) to execute smart contract code, chosen for its compact code and simpler security model. To encourage widespread adoption by developers, Venom supports high-level programming languages familiar to them for writing TVM programs.

The Threaded Virtual Machine (TVM) is a virtual machine used to execute smart contract code in the Venom blockchain. It is a Turing complete machine that can execute machine-level instructions asynchronously, allowing for concurrent processing of multiple smart contracts. TVM is utilized in various blockchain platforms, including Everscale, Venom, GOSH, and TON.

Accounts on the blockchain are considered actors in TVM, and each account can only affect the state of another account by sending a message. TVM utilizes the Actor model to handle interactions between accounts, which is different from how EVM-based networks operate. TVM is a stacking virtual machine that operates data in a stack, making it more suitable to execute code written in high-level languages. It provides a highly efficient and scalable way to handle account interactions in the Venom Blockchain.

Apache TVM is an open-source machine learning compiler framework that enables machine learning engineers to optimize and run computations efficiently on any hardware backend. The Relay virtual machine is a framework that provides a dynamic execution environment that can be extended, instrumented, and integrated with other approaches like ahead-of-time compilation via a flexible extension mechanism. Serialization of an executable generated by the Relay VM compiler is a must as we may want to save the model to disk and perform inference later.

In Venoms architecture, the masterchain serves as the hub of the network, collecting block proofs from various workchains and finalizing them. It validates all transactions and prevents fraudulent activities, while storing data on the networks state, including account balances, smart contracts, and other metadata.

The masterchain is an essential component of the Venom blockchain. It acts as a layer-0 chain that facilitates communication and coordination between workchains, shardchains, and accounts. This chain is responsible for maintaining network configuration, message routing, and validator information. Additionally, it stores and distributes the latest block hashes of corresponding shardchains and the current shard configuration. The masterchain is crucial to the security of the Venom blockchain, and its validators are incentivized to act honestly and secure the network by staking their tokens. Only a limited number of validators with the largest stakes are responsible for generating new masterchain blocks, ensuring the networks integrity.

Workchains are blockchain-based platforms developed by Venom, serving as the backbone for the network. They can support different types of decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contracts. The workchain architecture tackles the scalability problem of regular blockchains.

It is secured by a set of global validators and is connected to the masterchain, which provides an additional layer of security. Workchains can be tailored to fit the specific needs of the application it hosts, providing greater flexibility for developers. This can lead to better performance, faster transaction processing, and improved network efficiency.

The Venom blockchain comprises two distinct networks the Masterchain and the Basechain. The Basechain is the first layer-1 workchain for end-users, supporting dApps and executing smart contracts.

Shardchains, like processor cores, execute computations using their own private memory space, improving network performance by parallelizing computations between groups of validators. The Venom network starts with a single shardchain for all smart contract addresses. If transaction volume increases, the shardchain splits in two, and if transaction volume decreases, the shardchain merges back together.

These are individual partitions within the blockchain that hold information on a specific subset of accounts. The initial setup includes a single shardchain responsible for processing all transactions. However, if this shardchain becomes overloaded, it will automatically split into two new ones, ensuring that the workload is evenly distributed. This process continues until the transactions are efficiently processed by an appropriate number of shardchains, making it a fast and cost-effective solution.

Overall, Venoms asynchronous architecture is designed to address scalability issues and improve network performance, making it a promising platform for decentralized applications and smart contracts.

The Venom ecosystem is a hub of various tools and services designed to provide users with a seamless user experience and promote the adoption of the technology. Here are some of the base components of the Venom ecosystem:

Each of these products was created by independent teams participating in the Developer Program, showcasing the potential for developing solutions on the Venom blockchain. This open development model allows for innovation and creativity from the community, which ultimately strengthens the ecosystem.

Overall, the Venom ecosystem provides a robust and comprehensive suite of tools and services designed to support the adoption and growth of the technology. It offers a range of features and use cases, making it a versatile and valuable addition to the blockchain landscape.

The Venom Foundation aims to provide a solution for scaling blockchain networks in real time by offering horizontal and vertical scalability options.

Venom Blockchain is a blockchain protocol that, like many others, aims to tackle scalability challenges. To address this, there are two different approaches: horizontal scalability and vertical scalability.

Horizontal scalability involves increasing the number of nodes in a network to improve its capacity to process more transactions. Venom achieves this through a process called sharding, which partitions the network into smaller segments called shards that can process transactions in parallel.

Venom uses dynamic sharding to adjust the number of shards based on network demand, ensuring that the platform can handle large transaction volumes without compromising security or decentralization. This approach allows Venom to process up to 1 million transactions per second.

Vertical scalability, on the other hand, involves increasing the capacity of individual nodes in a network to process more transactions. This approach involves upgrading the hardware or software components of a node to improve its processing power. While vertical scalability can increase the performance of a single node, it has limitations in terms of how much it can improve the overall networks capacity.

However, there are several other challenges that need to be addressed, such as reliability and stability, the number of transactions that can be processed per second, cost per transaction, inability to silo user behavior, and security flaws.

To overcome these challenges, Venom Blockchain has adopted a heterogeneous multi-blockchain architectural approach to its blockchain design. This approach reduces transaction fees and solves the scalability challenge.

Venom Blockchains architecture comprises three layers that support parallel transaction processing, which allows it to process as many as 100,000 to 1M transactions per second (TPS). In addition, the network uses a hybrid consensus protocol that combines proof-of-stake (PoS) and Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) algorithms to ensure fast finality.

Despite the challenges facing various blockchain networks, Venom Blockchain has a competitive advantage over other technologies in the industry due to its exceptional features, including scalability, security, regulation, adoption, and interoperability.

CaptainAltcoin's writers and guest post authors may or may not have a vested interest in any of the mentioned projects and businesses. None of the content on CaptainAltcoin is investment advice nor is it a replacement for advice from a certified financial planner. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CaptainAltcoin.com

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Venom Blockchain: A Scalable and Secure Solution for the Future of ... - Captain Altcoin

The 5 Biggest Problems With Blockchain Technology Everyone Must … – OODA Loop

Blockchain technology has undeniably captured the imagination of the tech world and beyond, offering the promise of decentralized, transparent, and tamper-proof systems. From its inception with Bitcoin to the development of smart contracts, non-fungible tokens, and decentralized finance, blockchain has been hailed as a groundbreaking innovation with potential applications in numerous industries. But along with blockchains advantages come some significant challenges and to reach its full potential as a game-changing technology, these issues will need to be overcome. Lets take a look at some of the most pressing problems facing blockchain today.Blockchain networks can be slow and inefficient due to the high computational requirements needed to validate transactions. As the number of users, transactions, and applications increases, the ability of blockchain networks to process and validate them in a timely way becomes strained. This makes blockchain networks difficult to use in applications that require fast transaction processing speeds.Traditional blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum rely on consensus algorithms like proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, which can be slow and resource-intensive. As a result, these networks face limitations in transaction throughput, often leading to congestion and high transaction fees.

Full analysis : The 5 Biggest Problems With Blockchain Technology Everyone Must Know About.

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The 5 Biggest Problems With Blockchain Technology Everyone Must ... - OODA Loop

StarkNet Aims to Enhance Scalability, Privacy and Security on Ethereum – Yahoo Finance

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One of the problems with having custody of your own crypto is how difficult it is for everyday users to navigate the technology. A simple mistake can mean there is no way to recover your digital assets. For example, if you lose the keys (a series of alphanumeric characters) to your crypto account, you could lose access to your crypto forever. Traditional crypto wallets dont have set mechanisms in place that could let you recover your account if you do lose access to it, unlike what happens with bank accounts in traditional banking.

Humans are bound to make mistakes, and blockchain developers recognize that simple mishaps are inevitable. In order to make crypto more user-friendly, crypto needs fail-safe mechanisms for owning crypto.

(Starknet)

Read profiles of all of the Projects to Watch 2023: Reclaiming Purpose in Crypto

StarkWare, an Israel-based software company that wants to enhance scalability, privacy and security issues on the Ethereum blockchain, is one of the first projects to embrace account abstraction (AA).

Account abstraction aims to combine user accounts and smart contracts into a single type of account, allowing for security mechanisms such as social recovery and multisignatures. With AA, users wont need to use their private keys to sign off on every transaction.

StarkNet is a layer 2, or companion blockchain, to Ethereum created by StarkWare. It is one of the first projects to go full steam ahead with AA, and one of the first blockchains to natively integrate it.

Its founders, Eli Ben-Sasson and Uri Kolodny, more casually known as the Ernie and Bert of blockchain (its still up for debate who is who), have known each other since they were both 18 years old. Ben-Sasson, a computer science professor at Technion, has been involved longer in the blockchain space as co-founder of Zcash, the privacy crypto on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Story continues

Ben-Sasson and Kolodny decided to tackle the challenges of scaling and privacy on the Ethereum blockchain together, founding StarkWare in 2018.

One of StarkWares projects is its blockchain, StarkNet, which is a validity rollup that scales Ethereum. Rollups execute transactions off-chain and then send the transaction data back on-chain to verify them.

StarkNet is unusual because AA is natively integrated into the protocol. Unlike Ethereum, where AA, also known as ERC-4337, is an additional layer on top of Ethereum, users of StarkNet can natively use AA without having to reprogram their wallets into smart contracts.

But in order to understand what AA does, it is important to understand the different types of accounts on Ethereum and how they solve problems.

There are two types of accounts on Ethereum: external owned accounts (EOA) and contract accounts (CA), and they differ in terms of how they perform transactions over Ethereum.

EOAs are the most popular type of account on Ethereum (like a MetaMask wallet), where users are given a pair of keys: a public and a private key. Users send funds to an EOA using their public keys. But only the accounts owner (the user that has the private keys information) can actually initiate transactions from that account.

CAs, better known as smart contracts, are accounts that are controlled by code not private keys. Therefore, they cannot initiate transactions themselves. An EOA needs to send a transaction (which acts like a coded instruction) to a CA in order for it to execute transactions.

If you lose a private key to an EOA account, youre out of luck, because there is no way to regain access to your account (theres no help desk or password reset button). Therefore, you lose access to your funds.

Account abstraction addresses the shortcomings of EOAs by merging the two types, therefore allowing users to have built-in fail-safe mechanisms and other special features for verifying transactions.

Under AA, user accounts can program social recovery systems into their wallets where several people each with a key of their own have the ability to access that account should the owner lose their private key. Then theres also the option of creating multisig wallets, which requires multiple people to sign off on transactions as an extra layer of security.

So whats the difference between account abstraction on Ethereum versus StarkNet? On StarkNet, AA is natively integrated in wallets and applications on the blockchain. On Ethereum, theres still extra work that needs to be taken by providers and wallets in order for AA to be integrated with wallets.

The legacy that exists on Ethereum is a very limiting factor in this regard, meaning even if you do introduce AA, anyone developing an application has to take into account a very significant installed base of EOA accounts, said Kolodny. On StarkNet, we start from a clean slate, all you have are these smart wallets. That's the only sort of interaction that users have with the network.

So what can be done with account abstraction on StarkNet?

Security checks for authorizing transactions that already exist in the Web2 sphere, such as facial ID or fingerprint login, are already available on StarkNet. This is literally already working on applications on StarkNet, said Ben-Sasson. This immediacy of having the security and the [user experience] of whichever security means you're using on a day-to-day basis, you get it at the core protocol level already today on StarkNet.

Another use case that is natively available on StarkNet is what Ben-Sasson calls the deadman switch. Thanks to AAn on StarkNet, users can have features and coded logic built in that can transfer financial assets to others (that are pre-approved) in the event something happens. If I just get run by a bus, then I can have the funds transferred automatically to some other address, said Ben-Sasson. In a real world example, this would mimic that of a will and the transferring of traditional assets which would be costly because lawyers and procedures are involved. This switch skips the middleman and transfers digital assets in the event that something major happens, which can be programmed through code.

Lastly, multisig features, where multiple users can sign off on transactions as an extra layer of security are already available on StarkNet.

The biggest hurdle with account abstraction is its not widespread yet. Ben-Sasson and Kolodny agreed there needs to be some education for users on how this feature works in order for it to take off and for crypto to become more mainstream. Until then, several projects have started to signal their interest in AA and using StarkNet for those use cases.

Kolodny shared that gaming applications have turned to StarkNet to build their apps with AA because other chains' high gas costs have made it hard for any developer to build what they need on-chain. People for the first time actually are able to build the games that they wanted to build, Kolodny said.

Payment processor Visa told CoinDesk of a system in development using StarkNet, describing it in a thought-leadership proposal published in December. Visa detailed a novel solution for how StarkNet could be used to automate crypto transactions payments for bills. With StarkNets account model, we were able to implement our delegable accounts solution thus enabling auto payments for self-custodial wallets, the Visa researchers wrote.

But for now, getting developers to build on StarkNet and warming them up to these concepts [such as account abstraction] and getting them to creatively think about what this can do, is going to take a bit of time and effort and education, Kolodny said.

Read more: Ethereum Upgrade Could Make It Harder to Lose All Your Crypto

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StarkNet Aims to Enhance Scalability, Privacy and Security on Ethereum - Yahoo Finance