Features & Differences
Although it is based on an Ethereum-like model, Asch is designed to make developers' life much easier: adopting JavaScript as development language, or supporting DBMS to store the transaction data, all of these approaches make DApp development like traditional web application, which must be extremely attractive to developers and SMEs. We believe the ecosystem of the whole platform will not be developed sustainably unless developers productivity could be promoted. Asch is also an open platform whose focus is not limited to a particular area, such as finance, document storage, or copywrite proof, but is on providing a series of underlying and abstract APIs, which can be combined and utilized to realize almost all kinds of applications. In addition Asch system utilized enhenced DPOS agorithm in its consensus mechanism to significantly reduce the probability of block fork and the risk of duplicate payment. Most importantly, Asch's sidechain-is-application mode can not only alleviate the blockchain inflation issue, but also make DApp more resilient and characteristic. Overall Asch is a prospective, low-cost, one-stop solution that is surely able to be the incubator of next generation decentralised application.
Sidechain architecture
The advantage of adopting sidechain is data independency which does not burden the mainchain with the data inflation. It is a nature partition mechanism. Also, by using sidechain it is very flexible to customize blockchain parameters such as blcok interval, transaction fee, and rewards etc.
Byzantine fault tolerance
Asch system can tolerate up to 1/3 nodes fail simultaneously, as long as there is no such situation like most of delegates are cooperatively cheating or a large wide range of delegates are being hacked, transactions and blocks are not roll-back, which makes transaction confirmations significantly fast - usually only 2 confirmations would meet the basic secure requirement.
Secure Sandbox
On each Asch node can installed more than one sidechain subsystem, and the owner of Asch node does not need to trust the developer of sidechain. To achieve this aim, a security mechanism is necessary. It is a sandbox mechanism provided by Asch that can prevent sidechain code stealing the owner's information and causing damage to the server.
DApp Store
Applications submitted by developers will be registered into main chain, and users can browse, check and use them in their main chain wallet. An application will not be utilized until it is downloaded and installed by delegates, therefore delegates are able to charge a certain maintenance fee, or collect a transaction fee as a witness of this application.
Decentralised voting
Currently witnesses of block production are generated by a voting system built in main chain. Asch system will adjust the decentralisation level of the whole network according to the amount of witness hence calculation power attack and mining pool centralisation issue can be prevented.
Developer Friendly
Asch system provides a series of application templates and SDK that allow developers to rapidly create applications. With the support of nodejs as development language and RDMS as blockchain data storage, traditional webapp developers are also able to easily grasp the technique.
Who are using Asch
Normal User
Normal users can use Asch system through the online wallet or client downloaded by them. The functionalities they can used include checking the account, transferring, voting, browsing blocks, downloading and using applications and etc. In detail, users can only use the applications pre-installed by delegates through lite or online wallet but can download and install applications in appstore through the full version wallet.
Delegates/Witnesses
Delegates/Witnesses are the writers and examiner of blockchain data. They are voted by all the coin holders and are responsible for operating the whole network correctly. We can imagine delegates like miners in Bitcoin system but without that much calculation power. The process of delegates producing blocks is called forge, through which delegates can charge transaction fee and reward as network maintenance expense.
Developer friendly
Developers can create and deploy DApps following the application development standards and business activities criteria of Asch platform and according to the related specifications. DApps apply different business models, such as free software, proprietary software with monetary cost, or charged with value-added service. It is up to developers to choose which type of business models. Dapps will be deployed to application store, on which other users can download and use them.
Application Scenario and Solutions
Issue Asset
Even without a single line of code, developers may issue a complete token system by just adjusting some genesis parameters in genesis.json. Like the sub-currency in Ethereum, the token within Asch system can be used as gold, stock, collateral, or any other types of assets. Not only can these token be traded with XAS transferred in sidechain through a decentralised way, but also can they be exchanged with other currencies in a decentralised exchange. That is how these tokens are circulating.
Mediation
Let's say that a buyer wants to trade with a person he does not know. Usually if the transaction could smoothly proceed, both sides of the transaction would not like any interference from other people. If however there are some issues happened in any step, for example, buyers are not satisfied with items they bought, they may want a mediator to solve the dispute. The mediator may ask both sides to show some evidences for making the decision, like refund buyers. Asch system provides a series of API of multi-signature to help developers to finish these kinds of applications.
Decentralised Exchange
There are two kinds of decentralisation based on whether the legal money is supported. A full decentralisation can be realised if it is no need to support legal money, otherwise half decentralisation is the only option. In this case, the legal money can be transferred through the gateway but all transaction information will be fully open. And there are two types of full decentralisations: one is peer-to-peer transaction, which can be implemented by "Atomic cross-chain transaction API" provided by Asch system, and the other is pending transaction that needs sellers to transfer a particular amount of assets from other blockchain to Asch sidechain. The transferring will be completed by the SPV of frozen assets from parent chain. Also, with joint-table query and index functionality supported by DBMS, it is very easy to implement a highly efficient matching engine.
Proof of Existence
Proof of Existence can be used to register document's copywrite or patent, by saving the target document's hash value into Asch sidechain so that the existence of this document can be proven. Practically some other meta-data, such as timestamp or participants' digital signature, can also be appended to prove since when had they possessed these documents. All of the privacy information cannot be forged, distorted, or exposed, and if necessary, the information can be verified easily without any help from thirt-party institutions.
Internet of Things
There are enormous devices existed in IoT which make it extremely difficult to let a central authority to manage all of them as well as all nodes' identity. Asch sidechain, however, could be an appropriate solution for the following reasons: first, it solved the trust issue among the nodes. All devices are connected to each other to form a distributed network, and the credibility of transactions among devices can be guaranteed by consensus algorithm, and all transactions can be traced, auditted and analysed. Second, different types of devices can be linked into different sidechains, which is a nature partition mechanism we mentioned above that prevents main ledger from explosively growing.
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