Decentralized Social Media Organization Says Web3 Will Not Use Smart Contracts to Allow It to Scale Up as It Pushes Its HyperSync Upgrade

May 03, 2022 - /PressAdvantage/ - The DeSo Foundation, an organization focused on a new layer-1 blockchain built from the ground up to scale decentralized social media applications, is happy to announce that they are pushing through with their HyperSync upgrade and point out that Web3 will not be built on smart contracts. They want to emphasize that general-purpose smart contract blockchains, while suitable for financial applications that only require light storage, would not be able to handle the heavy storage requirements of social apps and markets. Anticipating these limitations, DeSo is pushing its technological breakthrough with a HyperSync.

HyperSync offers a quick and scalable way for downloading a blockchain. Traditional blockchains weren’t really designed for the decentralized version of social media because they’re too costly. DeSo engineer Piotr Nojszewski explains “HyperSync is a new approach to node synchronization designed for infinite-state blockchains that is orders of magnitude faster than traditional block synchronization.”

DeSo founder Nader Al-Naji says, “To power a financial application, all you need to really store is a few account balances for each user. In contrast, to power a social application, you not only need to store every post, like, follow, and much more, but you also need to index that data so that you can answer queries like ‘who is this person following’ or ‘what are this person's recent posts?’ This is something that blockchains have historically been incapable of at scale.”

High on-chain storage cost is preventing the large majority of Web2 applications from being implemented on the general purpose blockchains, even if they use bridges to storage-focused blockchains. Furthermore, even if blockchains are able to handle thousands of transactions per second, it doesn’t take into account the storage requirements of the app. The problem is that there is a huge difference between 50,000 DeFi transactions, which may produce zero bytes of new state data, in contrast to 50,000 social transactions in decentralized social media, which may produce tens of MBs of data that will need to be stored, queried, and indexed.

To understand how HyperSync works, it is important to understand that traditionally, blocks will have to be downloaded to sync blockchains. The node will have to download all blocks starting from the first block up to the latest block, including all of the transactions contained in those blocks. The node will then reprocess all of those transactions until the node arrives at the latest blockchain state. The process is inefficient because some of the transactions can overlap several times. HyperSync uses an approach where instead of downloading and reprocessing all transactions, it is only the result of these transactions.

Furthermore, HyperSync uses two game-changing improvements, which they call EllipticSum and Ancestral Records. EllipticSum allows the validation or confirmation that the snapshot taken is indeed the result of all of the historical transactions. EllipticSum employs a totally new algorithm to validate state integrity. This is based on advanced Elliptic Curve Cryptography, which is able to solve the state integrity problem with higher efficiency. In addition, while most existing solutions for state integrity problems need to store tens of GBs of additional dummy data, EllipticSum only needs one 33 byte number.

Another problem is that in order for blockchain nodes to download the balance sheet for the transactions, it has to be on standby and ready to be sent. This means that blockchains will have to make a copy of that particular balance sheet. Thus, if there is a 100 GB state, this will require some 100 GB of data to be copied to provide those snapshots and this will need to be done periodically. This is inefficient and is a huge burden to scalability. Ancestral Records offers the solution for reducing such large overhead by only requiring the theoretical minimal amount of additional data to provide the required snapshot. The result is that HyperSync makes it much quicker to sync a node, which makes it easier to run one, which boosts decentralization.

Those interested in decentralized social networks can check out the DeSo website, or contact them on the phone or through email.

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For more information about DeSo, contact the company here:

DeSo
Arash Ghaemi
(562) 384-2691
[email protected]
20 W 34th St, New York, NY 100001

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