InterValue’s TestNet 2.0 release: implementation of HashNet

BEIJING, June 28, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Blockchain has received a lot of attention in the past few years and blockchain projects have captured a significant share of the capital that used to be reserved to the Web industry. Due to the highly speculative nature of those projects, their value often does not reflect the actual work and only a handful of projects seem to be able to deliver on their promises.

The InterValue blockchain project was unveiled to public in April 2018. As it went online for the first time, its founders expressed their vision for the establishment of the Blockchain 4.0 era. It immediately appeared as one of the few projects that insist on practical research on the blockchain technology and aim to bring real improvements to this field. In just two months, the project was introduced in many blockchain events across the world, receiving a lot of attention from industry influencers and investors. It also got backed by several well-known investment institutions.

In June 2018, InterValue was featured several times among the most promising blockchain projects by international media, which resulted in increased interest from the public. In an era where people do not have the time to dive into the details of the projects, the InterValue team has been steadily moving forward, focusing on efficiency to stick to their promises. InterValue is about to reach a crucial landmark with the release of its v2.0 testnet, featuring its brand new HashNet consensus. This major step will greatly improve platform scalability and transaction speed. The InterValue team is still pushing the development. By the time this paper is published, the speed of Intervalue2.0 testnet single intra-subnet transaction confirmation will exceed 140000TPS, and the whole capacity and transaction speed have reached hundreds of thousand, far exceeding the other public chain projects in the market.

In addition, InterValue will launch the recruitment of local full nodes and light nodes for its v2.0 testnet and welcomes its community members and investment institutions to participate in the test. More information about this recruitment will be delivered in a notice that will be published soon. Nodes participating in the test will be rewarded in INVE tokens according to the amount of transactions that they confirmed during the consensus process.

InterValue’s v2.0 testnet release

The previous InterValue v1.0 testnet adopted a two-level consensus mechanism combining the DAG consensus as a basis and the BA-VRF consensus, allowing very fast transaction speed and very short confirmation time.

The new InterValue v2.0 testnet is featured with HashNet consensus, HashNet consensus was independently designed by InterValue team. Based on Hashgraph consensus algorithm, HashNet greatly realizes two-layer sharding of the consensus mechanism. In particular, it adopts a hierarchical gossip network and a newly designed sharding algorithm that supports both nodes-sharding and states-sharding, which enables rapid delivery of transactions between nodes in different shards to achieve asymptotic linear TPS increments, equipping the whole system with high concurrency and fast confirmation.

As one of the major milestones of InterValue’s development roadmap, the implementation of the HashNet consensus mechanism will significantly improve InterValue’s capacity and transaction speed by achieving 1 million TPS.

InterValue’s v2.0 testnet HashNet consensus

Given the problems and bottlenecks faced by the blockchain technology in the current state, InterValue designed and implemented the HashNet consensus mechanism. As shown in Figure 1, HashNet uses a two-layer gossip topology to form a divide-and-conquer distributed ledger system by “intra-shard autonomy, inter-shard collaboration”. In HashNet, the nodes in top-layer are called full nodes and they are responsible for the maintenance of node topology and sharding in lower-layer. The nodes in lower-level are called local full nodes and responsible for transaction verification, consensus, storage and ledger synchronization.

HashNet nodes are divided into four categories: full nodes, local full nodes, light nodes, and micro nodes.

Full nodes: (1) responsible for maintaining the topology of the node, including the periodical joining and removing of full nodes, and periodical joining and removing of local full node; (2) responsible for updating shards, including determining the number of shards per cycle and which local full nodes are clustered into the same shard.

Local full nodes: (1) Act as proxy nodes to provide transactional proxy services to light nodes and micro nodes; (2) Within the shard, local full nodes serve as the main body of transaction consensus, realizing transaction verification, consensus, and bookkeeping; (3) Between shards, local full nodes adopt the gossip protocol to spread their billing to other shards, thereby realizing the synchronization of ledger data.

Light nodes: Usually a lightweight client wallet, this node can complete data requests and data sending through local full nodes.

Micro-nodes: Usually a smart IoT device, this node can perform data request and data sending through local full-nodes.

Main advantages of the HashNet consensus mechanism:

(1) The full nodes and the local full nodes have strong stability and processing ability. In comparison with Hashgraph, which has been massively recommended lately, HashNet effectively solves the problem that Hashgraph faces, i.e., it costs a long time for Hashgraph to achieve consensus. And HashNet can also avoid network segmentation by malicious node attack.

(2) Uses a two-layer gossip topology to do the sharding operation of nodes. Compared with another blockchain project, ranking high among sharding blockchains, full nodes in HashNet are only responsible for managing sharding, which avoids a system bottleneck. In addition, local full nodes are responsible for transaction consensus and ledger synchronization, and the consensus process does not need to distinguish inter-shard and intra-shard transactions, which brings better system scalability.

(3) The inter-shard ledger synchronization uses gossip protocol to distribute consensus events. In particular, the receiving node automatically implements the multi-signature verification in process of reconstructing ledger in the other shard, which greatly reduces multi-signature delay, and safely as well as efficiently satisfies inter-shard ledger synchronization.

InterValue’s v2.0 testnet: preliminary performance Alpha test

The InterValue team has set up a local preliminary experimental environment to run InterValue 2.0 alpha test. It consists of one full node, 3 local full nodes (forming one single shard) and 2 light nodes that will serve as simulators for transaction data. Every 50ms, each light node simulator will process 15,000 transactions, which equals to a total of 300,000 transactions per second. The TPS data will be calculated in real time by a single computing thread. The actual measurements should result in a transaction confirmation speed of around 141,495TPS.

InterValue’s v2.0 testnet implications

The implementation of HashNet consensus in InterValue’s v2.0 testnet is a major milestone for the project. During the design, development, and implementation of the blockchain infrastructure, design and implementation of sharding mechanism is indeed a difficulty, ranging from academic research to implementation. Compared with other projects, HashNet consensus mechanism implements a hierarchical P2P network architecture design as well as nodes-sharding and states-sharding. Similar designs and implementations have not been seen in other projects. HashNet consensus has resulted in a leap-forward increase in the number of concurrent transactions and confirmation speed. This has provided InterValue with the most practical infrastructure that can support the development and application of DApps scaled to millions of users. Those technical guarantees are very important, as they will allow to quickly build an ecosystem for different application scenarios. InterValue’s v2.0 testnet source code will also be gradually open on Github. The team will also open a recruitment plan for local full nodes and light nodes in early July 2018 so that various groups that are concerned about InterValue project can actually participate in and understand the overall development progress of InterValue.

InterValue’s future developments

InterValue’s product line is divided into two phases: platform development and application promotion. During the platform development phase, four iterative upgrades will be performed. InterValue’s products will ultimately be launched according to the project's vision and then will enter into the application promotion phase. After the InterValue v2.0 testnet release, the team will continue to advance in all aspects of the work according to the plan.

In Q3 2018, an anonymous privacy protection function based on zero-knowledge proof and ring signatures will be added to v2.0 testnet, and InterValue v3.0 testnet will be introduced.

In Q4 2018, cryptographic algorithms, signature algorithms, and hash algorithms for anti-quantum attacks will be added, and then InterValue’s main net will be officially launched.

At the same time, the applications based on InterValue’s blockchain will be rapidly advancing. The team plans to develop a distributed social platform and a globally distributed storage grid both based on InterValue.

In addition, the InterValue team, as a technology provider, has collaborated with several companies that have used blockchain technology to optimize and enhance existing business processes, with the perspective of using InterValue infrastructure in a number of practical application areas and scenarios (currently under development).

At the same time, the team is actively building a community of developers, a community of blockchain technology universal and a coalition of partners. They will also launch DApp development incentive plans on InterValue to ensure that more resources, teams, and technical talents contribute to the development of InterValue infrastructure. In view of the development of DApp based on InterValue, the project is being actively promoted, and InterValue will be deployed across as many industries and actual scenarios as possible.

InterValue, a highly practical decentralized distributed application development platform, will become the world's first practical blockchain 4.0 infrastructure to support large-scale applications, and will also be the foundation for the construction of the industry's public-chain infrastructure and the next-generation global value Internet.

InterValue Project：
Website: https://www.inve.one
TG (main): https://t.me/InterValueProject
Twitter: https://twitter.com/intervaluepro
Medium blog: https://medium.com/@intervalueproject
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InterValueofficial/
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/intervalue
Quora: https://intervalue.quora.com