Contribution for the Polkadot Community: Open Source NFT based AURA Consensus Algorithm and Introducing the Mosaic Indexer

Tech Talk
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Hi Everyone,

I am Vikk, representing the Mosaic Team, and I would like to share some updates and news regarding the development of Mosaic Chain. Additionally, I want to introduce the concept of two technology stacks that we would like to open-source for the Polkadot community.

Mosaic Chain is a Parachain, bringing innovative DeFi solutions. The first dApp, built on Mosaic Chain, will offer token basket-based decentralized investment products, similar to TokenSets/Set Protocol, but based on Substrate with much more features. Other than bringing our community’s liquidity to Polkadot, we will also start open-sourcing the project with the improvements to Aura and later, our indexer as well. The latter is in the PoC stage.

As well as promoting DeFi services and making them more efficient, we are placing a strong emphasis on decentralizing blockchain and its connected infrastructure as much as possible. We already developed the following:

1. The Mosaic Indexer:
We are developing our decentralized indexing architecture (currently it is in the proof-of-concept stage) called Mosaic Indexer. This architecture aims to eliminate our dependence on centralized cloud services by making the indexing of on-chain events and the querying of data to dApps and explorers fully community-controlled, rather than reliant on Web2 companies. In this approach, not only will the collators/validators of the Mosaic chain be decentralized, but also the archiving nodes and the indexer will be deployed across as many nodes within the Mosaic ecosystem as possible.

2. The NFT based Aura consensus improvements and rights:
The modified Aura works with NFTs: every collator binds its NFTs and can only participate in the consensus if they own these NFTs. We complemented the Aura consensus algorithm used by the Parachain Collators to support a larger number of nodes. This enhancement allows up to hundreds of collators to run on the Mosaic Chain, significantly decentralizing the collator base. As a result, the Proof of Validity (PoV) checks are transmitted to the Relay Chain in a more decentralized manner, which increases the likelihood of blockchain up-time over the long term.

Use-Cases

  • The Mosaic Indexer speaks for itself: its decentralizing the process of the data querying from Mosaic Chain.

  • NFT based Aura consensus: Liberating the governance of validator selection. The product is to make Polkadot and Parachains more accessible to participate in the validation, and do not necessarily need to understand the complexity of the collation process. This solution lets the general users to participate in the validation process.

Our motivation
We would like to see more useful open source solutions in the Polkadot ecosystem. This is why we share the NFT based Aura consensus algorithm improvements for free and we would like to share the Mosaic Indexer demo later.

You can find the concept of the NFT based Aura consensus in Mosaic Chain’s Github: Mosaic Chain · GitHub From this point anyone can grab the code and implement it.

What about the Mosaic Indexer? The Mosaic Indexer can already query the on-chain events from the Session and the Balances pallets. We’ll share a demo with the Polkadot community soon. We aim to further develop the Mosaic Indexer and add more pallets. This would allow every parachain team to implement a fully open source and free (FOSS) Indexer on their own chains, making the indexing process more community owned, thus decentralized.

We wanted to share these achievements with the Polkadot Community. As a new and continuously developing Parachain with no Canary network, we are keen to hear the Polkadot Community’s thoughts about these technologies. We started to build on Polkadot because this is the ecosystem that is most technologically driven towards the highest level of decentralization. With the development of the NFT-based Aura consensus algo and the decentralized, community-owned indexer infrastructure, we want to add to the ethos of decentralization in the Polkadot ecosystem.

We are pleased to hear your thoughts on this and please share your comments below!

7 Likes
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Great initiative from our long-term partners. An open-source indexer is a must have.

Keep up the good work!

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A few months ago we built a project on kusama and one challenge to work on is building an indexer, I think this project could bring a great value if done well

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sounds like a good idea.
Definitely something I’d love to try out and use at some point :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thank you @six!

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Thank you for your comment @effreet!
The Mosaic Indexer would be an excellent solution for all the Parachains to index on-chain events in a decentralised fashion. This is not just a cool technology to differentiate the Polkadot ecosystem from other, much more centralised ecosystems, but it’s a fundamentally new concept that is open source, allowing all teams to continuously add new pallets to it. It’s a truly necessary step towards full decentralisation.

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Thank you @serapath for your comment. Good ideas and open-source solutions bring forward the ecosystem. :100:

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Good to see the indexer demo is ready! Anyone who wants to implement it, feel free to DM me, Vikk or the Mosaic team.

Ps: that is something we’ll use with G6 Networks as well.