Hi everyone,
I’m Luka, my background is in engineering - protocol level of different DLTs (DAGs and blockchains), distributed systems at Microsoft Azure and Polkadot Blockchain Academy alumni with distinction.
Most of the things that will be described bellow, we’ve already implemented.
Tagline:
Framework for creating client side peer-to-peer (p2p) state channels for arbitrary state machines with shared security inherited from a distributed ledger (blockchain). All the peer-to-peer networking is done between users’ clients.
Brief description:
The main goal of the project is to create fully peer-to-peer applications (without any central servers) that are highly scalable, resilient and secure, but also provide the building blocks by solving common problems to enable others to do the same.
Peer-to-peer (p2p) state channels have many benefits - they’re highly scalable and decentralized due to their network topology and tendency to partition sate within their group of interaction, they offer real-time communication that’s ‘free’ (no transaction fee), but do not act like a trusted party like blockchains do.
What we aim to achieve is combine the best of both worlds, the decentralized and scalable nature of full p2p systems, while also inheriting full security from a distributed ledger.
Notice that society works in the exact same way. For most of our lives, we (peers) interact with other peers in small groups (partitions). We (peers) form agreements and commit to faithfully executing on them and in the case where those agreements fail, we go to a court system to dispute one another inorder to enforce those agreements. The courts have limited capacity and their intervention is slow and expensive, but they are trusted by all parties (that freely chose to be in that jurisdiction) to be impartial, objective and faithfully come to a verdict on the agreement/law (state machine).
Real life game theory applies here too. The courts (blockchains) have limited capacity, but most peers faithfully execute all agreements, knowing there will be consequences and enforcement if they don’t. The ones that fail, the courts (blockchains) have enough capacity to deal with them.
How does this relate to Polkadot:
While most of the system is peer-to-peer, the shared security provided by a distributed ledger is paramount. While any distributed ledger that offers execution of arbitrary logic can work, we’ve picked Polkadot as the HQ (headquarters) since we believe we share the same core values and mission (resilience, heterogeneous sharding, shared security and cross-chain interoperability) as the Polkadot ecosystem.
The value proposition for Polkadot is improving the user experience by providing a ‘free’ real-time execution environment which all parachains currently lack and expanding the market by capturing value from other ecosystems and repatriating it back to Polkadot - positioning Polkadot as the HQ and onboarding new users and developers into the ecosystem.
Future Plans:
Everything we build, we build with resiliency, decentralization and scalability in mind. We never want to introduce a centralized server in our design or run any infrastructure. This offers a clear benefit to our users, but also to us, since we don’t have to maintain servers and our operational costs converge to 0 overtime. Our only long term costs should be development of new state machines and improving existing ones. We plan on picking and developing state machines that provide real utility, without any ponzi (unsustainable) economics. We want them to be useful and a better alternative to existing solutions today. We believe the systems we create can offer the good user experience of web2 (centralized) systems, with all of the web3 (decentralized) security and permissionless guarantees.
While the core infrastructure will always remain free as a public good and accessible to everyone, the concrete state machines will have a business model that’s sustainable.
Our first state machine will be poker, a popular game without any practical web3 implementation. The state machine will charge a fraction of the fee of what other centralized web2 providers charge and only capturing a small percentage of the poker market should be more than enough to fund all our future costs. We don’t only provide a better alternative to the end user, but we also solve a problem for most casinos. Most of the poker market is captured by 2 big centralized providers and smaller providers can’t compete since the big guys have all the users (a popular phrase in finance “liquidity attracts liquidity”). With this solution, existing casinos can pool their player base with other casinos and web3 native users without any intermediaries to handle funds and guarantee fairness, while at the same time having the user experience of web2. A few local and a few representatives from bigger international casinos already showed interest.
Team:
Partially grant supported:
- Co-founder - Luka Stanisic
- Engineer - Dragan Basta
- Designer - Aleksa Krstic
- Business development - Aleksa Gradinski
- Business development - Gerard Murphy
Advisors / Not grant supported:
- Cryptography - Jeffrey Burdges
- Economics & legal - Kasper Mai Jørgensen
