Achain is a decentralized public blockchain platform that enables developers to easily, quickly, and securely release tokens, smart contracts, and blockchain systems. Achain is dedicated to building a global blockchain network system that facilitates information exchange, value interconnectivity, and trust exchange. Achain's vision and technological mission is to build a blockchain world without barriers.
I. Project Introduction
Achain's unique RDPOS distributed consensus mechanism has achieved a Turing-complete smart contract virtual machine with independent intellectual property rights. With on-chain transaction performance reaching 1000 TPS, Achain is a simple, fast, and secure blockchain platform. Users can quickly deploy digital assets, smart contracts, and other enterprise-grade decentralized applications on Achain. ACT token holds value within the Achain ecosystem. Token holders can participate in community activities such as creating and releasing smart contracts, accessing network services, voting as a proxy, and gaining profits.
Project Features
Stability
Stability is a prerequisite for ensuring the availability of Achain. Blockchain inherently possesses decentralization features, and decentralized networks are typically complex and uncertain. Therefore, we use modular design tools to abstract and simplify the blockchain, individually building a modular virtual machine - Lua Virtual Machine (LVM) to run smart contracts. This design offers two advantages. First, optimizing LVM performance directly enhances contract execution efficiency, reducing interference from system coupling. Second, it weakens the correlation between the blockchain network and the smart contract running status. Even if contract execution encounters problems or the virtual machine malfunctions, the stability of the blockchain network can still be guaranteed.
Security
PoW has made significant contributions to the security of the Bitcoin network, but due to the increasing mining demand and rising computational complexity, almost all rights are concentrated in the hands of miners and mining pools. Through professional collaborations, they have effectively become highly centralized "central servers." If they combine more than 51% of the computing power, they could theoretically control the majority of Bitcoin transactions, such as the well-known DOS (Denial of Service) attack. Furthermore, the high power consumption is also a cause for concern. Compared to the PoW model, the PoS model is still under development, with these developments primarily focused on security and applications. The PoS model has a significant advantage over the PoW model in terms of security, but this is contingent on attracting enough holders to engage in PoS mining to fully realize the security advantage. DPoS is an improvement on PoS, and Achain innovatively developed the RDPoS consensus mechanism, which is more commercially applicable. With the same security level as DPoS, it can theoretically improve block response times, enhancing network stability and security. In addition, Achain innovatively introduces the intelligent sandbox mechanism. Any contract published must first be trial-run in the intelligent sandbox. Achain conducts full-path automated testing and continuously monitors its running status. If its health deteriorates or vulnerabilities are detected, the network automatically determines to terminate it, preventing problematic contracts from causing damage to the blockchain ecosystem.
Scalability
The concept of scalability addresses the problem of information silos created by incompatible blockchains. Firstly, we believe that upgrades and forks are one of the effective ways for network evolution, resulting in a main chain and several sub-chains. From a technical perspective, the main chain and sub-chains are completely equal, but they are assigned different identifiers based on community consensus. Each sub-chain can be customized to suit different business applications. By building VEP between sub-chains, which function like gateways, sub-chains can interact information and exchange value through VEP. Such collaboration can create a blockchain ecosystem with multiple applications. Moreover, non-blockchain online data will also be incorporated into the Achain ecosystem, which, combined with smart contracts, can respond to real-world events.
Ease of Use
Achain achieves ease of use through two aspects. First, it provides a Blockchain-as-a-Service platform (BaaS) to lower the usage threshold for businesses and individuals. Through network forking, data customization, smart contract deployment and upgrades, asset transaction monitoring, and visual functions, blockchain applications become simple and easy to use. Second, Achain supports multiple languages, from Lua and C++ to Java, enabling developers from different platforms to easily develop.
Application Scenarios
Supply Chain Finance
Supply chain finance involves financial institutions (typically banks) managing the cash flow and logistics of upstream and downstream small and medium-sized enterprises around a core enterprise. It integrates information to minimize risk and provides financial services. This industry has seen rapid growth in recent years. Due to the high cost of establishing credit, financial institutions must exercise caution due to risk control, often missing out on some high-quality projects. Achain can help businesses and financial institutions rebuild credit systems and establish more efficient supply chain finance.
Taking the core enterprise as an endorsement, Achain can be used to establish a warehouse, logistics, digital invoice, and enterprise credit blockchain platform. It enables supply chain upstream and downstream enterprises, and financial institutions to witness the information related to goods, warehousing, logistics, and receivables together. The issuance, confirmation, transfer, splitting, and acceptance of digital invoices are triggered by contracts initiated by various participants in the supply chain. The triggering conditions can be based on changes in data status within the warehousing, logistics blockchain, and the core enterprise database. Triggering rules are written according to the agreements of the participating parties, and actions that comply with or violate the rules are recorded in the credit blockchain and cannot be tampered with.
Utilizing BaaS, intelligent sandbox, and other technological advantages, businesses can achieve rapid deployment. Through low-cost and quick forking, different blockchain networks can be established, VEP can be used to establish connection protocols, and data integration can achieve event-driven functionalities. All participating parties can jointly verify the authenticity of data, ensuring smooth flow of funds in the supply chain and enhancing collaborative efficiency.
Product Origin Tracking
The retail industry inherently possesses fragmented transaction data, diversified transaction nodes, and complex transaction networks. People purchase products through online stores or offline supermarkets, and their packaging often indicates origin information, production date, and producer. However, it is difficult to determine the authenticity of this information. Due to the large profit margin from counterfeiting, high-value products, such as diamonds, leather bags, and skincare products, are more likely to be counterfeited. Counterfeiting not only damages consumer interests and the reputation and brand image of merchants, but society also has to spend money and manpower to enforce legal supervision and sanctions. Regarding product origin tracking, there are currently several pain points: Firstly, product origin tracking requires tracing back to not only the production stage but also the circulation stage. This inevitably involves more entities providing endorsements, making cross-organizational collaboration challenging. Secondly, regardless of the producer or logistics provider, the systems they use are bound to be centralized, leading to information silos. Thirdly, centralized systems all have the risk of individual wrongdoing.
To address these three pain points, Achain proposes a solution of blockchain + the Internet of Things (IoT). With the help of IoT, data from the production and logistics stages can be collected in real-time through intelligent devices and accessed through VEP to be stored in the origin tracking network on Achain. The unique data storage structure and distributed ledger technology of blockchain ensure the immutability of on-chain data. Meanwhile, asymmetric encryption and relative anonymity guarantee that enterprise core information is not leaked. When consumers need to inquire about product information, they only need to know the product code and production batch number to trace back to all the product information.
Technical Overview
Contract and LVM Implementation
Traditional smart contracts are limited to input and output of on-chain data, only supporting simple application scenarios. For this reason, Achain redefined smart contracts, allowing interactions between on-chain and off-chain data in addition to on-chain data, and supporting event responses to changes in on-chain and off-chain data status. Most business applications in the real world are very complex, with complexities reflected in data structures and logical rules. To achieve the above objectives, Achain prepared in two aspects at the top-level design. First, abstract potential applications, extract common needs, and design API interfaces and data structures in advance. Second, select a Turing-complete language to closely approximate the rules of the real physical world.
Consensus Mechanism
Due to its distributed nature, blockchains require a consensus mechanism to function properly. Currently, the widely used consensus algorithms include: Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS). Considering security and practicality, Achain selected DPoS and improved it to create the RDPoS consensus mechanism.
RDPoS not only inherits the advantages of DPoS - the ability to distribute rights after block generation without consuming extra computing power, but it can also dynamically determine, based on the network's transaction status, whether the execution results of smart contracts should be verified by proxies or all nodes.
As a public chain, Achain's formation of community consensus is inseparable from the support of economic mechanisms - Token. Holding Tokens not only grants access to blockchain basic services such as contract deployment and network forking, but also allows participation in voting to become a proxy node and provide services to earn Token rewards. Achain names this Token ACT, and every ACT holder is called a rights holder. Voting weight is allocated according to the number of ACTs held. Proxy nodes are elected by rights holders through voting. The top 99 proxies with the most votes take turns verifying transactions in order, with the order determined jointly by all proxy nodes, ensuring it cannot be tampered with. Proxies earn income for normal work, while they will be punished for abnormal or non-work.
Account Model
In blockchain networks, account addresses are designed for secure exchanges. The account, public key, and private key generation processes have the following relationship: Private key -> Public key -> Account address. All three use the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA), ensuring sufficient security. Hashing is the process of extracting information, and its output is typically much smaller than the input, and is a fixed length. With current technological means, a secure hash is always irreversible. That is, the user's private key information cannot be deduced from their account address.
Achain uses the Account model instead of Bitcoin's UTXO model (Unspent Transaction Output). Although UTXO is a clever design, supporting parallel transactions and offering relatively good account privacy protection, Bitcoin's account design is specifically for transaction-oriented purposes, making it challenging to implement smart contracts based on UTXO. Smart contracts in the Achain ecosystem often require conditions and statuses to trigger asset transactions, therefore Achain ultimately chose the Account model.
Forking Networks
Achain advocates for a network suitable for forking, based on two considerations. Firstly, to maintain robust vitality, and secondly, to meet different application scenarios. Firstly, a blockchain network is a community formed by many participants according to certain consensus. Consensus splits lead to hard forks, which can sometimes be good and sometimes bad. Through people's screening and elimination, ultimately a valuable set of blockchain networks will be left, which is highly consistent with the self-organizing world's rules of species and environments continuously self-evolving.
Achain will serve as the starting point for the entire forked network, and can also be called the main chain. The main chain can fork out sub-chains parallel to it, and sub-chains can continue to fork. All chains are equal in status. When forking occurs, VEP will record and broadcast the registration information of this sub-chain, such as genesis block information, sub-chain ID, seed nodes, digital assets, service identification number, etc. If forking continues to occur, this registration information will be updated again by VEP and synchronized to the entire network. When chains need to interact with each other, they can establish a connection through service discovery using registration information, and realize information interaction and value exchange under the VEP framework. VEP is similar to the internet's DNS service, responsible for registering information, updating information, and providing access services.
Value Exchange Protocol (VEP)
VEP is a standard protocol that connects different blockchain networks. VEP sets rules for how to collaborate. It registers the registration information of each chain and provides services to the trusted list of chains for querying and connection requests. VEP supports two major application scenarios: cross-chain node interaction and cross-chain contract calling. The former leverages changes in node data or external data status to indirectly induce interactions between contracts, potentially generating new information. For example, failure to repay a loan on time according to contractual agreements will affect personal credit. Loan records can be stored on blockchain A, while credit data can be stored on blockchain B, and personal identity information may come from external public databases. The latter refers to contracts calling each other, with a simple example being the exchange of tokens between two chains, keeping the total value constant.
Event-Driven
Relying on VEP, Achain can achieve information interaction and value exchange between chains, and even incorporate non-blockchain data sources, such as IoT (Internet of Things), AI (Artificial Intelligence), enterprise or public service databases, into the ecosystem, achieving real-time event-driven functionalities.
II. Review
Achain is a public blockchain platform. Developers can issue tokens, smart contracts, create applications, and blockchain systems. Originated in 2015, the mainnet launched in July 2017. Achain is committed to building a global blockchain information exchange and value trading network. Achain was initially developed by Achain Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Singapore, built and maintained jointly by a global fan community.
Related Links:
https://www.achain.com/
http://www.qukuaiwang.com.cn/szhb/2352.html###
https://www.okex.com/cn/project/98/
