The Peercoin Foundation is Close to Unveiling Off-Chain Smart Contracts (April 2nd)
San Francisco, CA, United States, April 2nd, 2024, Chainwire
With the rise of smart contracts, it’s become standard for them to be hosted and executed directly on the blockchain. However, the Peercoin Foundation announced in a recent blog post that they are exploring a secure and decentralized method to move smart contract execution off-chain. This approach promises significant benefits, including enhanced privacy, reduced fees, and improved scalability.
With this innovative off-chain technology, the Peercoin Flutter app will support a range of decentralized applications, such as prediction markets and financial contracts like binary options and futures. Additionally, it will handle contracts reliant on Oracle-provided data, such as sports betting and election outcomes.
Peercoin’s second layer is envisioned as a collection of independent dApps where the app logic is executed off-chain, with final balances settled on Peercoin’s mainnet. In summary, shifting smart contract execution off-chain offers these advantages:
- Increased Privacy: To the outside world, the contract appears as a regular transaction without revealing any identifying information.
- Lower Fees: The transaction size is significantly reduced, and signature validation is inexpensive.
- Improved Scalability: The majority of computational work is handled off-chain, with only the final settlement occurring on the main chain.
The capability to manage financial contracts with a minimal on-chain presence while maintaining contract integrity and confidentiality represents a significant advancement in the pursuit of a more accessible and efficient blockchain ecosystem.
The blog article indicates that this project has been in development for over a year, and this week marks the first successful test of threshold signature support on Peercoin’s testnet, a crucial technology for the system’s functionality.
How does it work?
The strategy involves utilizing the following combination of technologies:
- Threshold Signatures are a cost-effective solution for achieving consensus in groups, potentially involving hundreds of participants. This method operates fully off-chain, ensuring complete privacy and offering limitless scalability.
- Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs) represent an innovative approach to executing contracts without the need for scripting or virtual machines. All critical details of the contract and its execution remain confidential, known only to the involved parties, with the blockchain utilized solely for initiating and concluding the contract.
- Oracles play a crucial role in processing real-world external events and providing this information to DLCs. These events can range from the results of a football game to stock values, allowing this data to be integrated into a contract.
Distributed Oracles (Oracle Swarms)
The primary challenge with DLCs has been their dependence on centralized oracles, which pose significant risks and undermine trust. By integrating the aforementioned technologies, this issue is addressed through the introduction of distributed oracles, also known as oracle swarms.
Oracle swarms solve this problem by eliminating the need to trust a single entity. Instead, they rely on a network of potentially hundreds of participants with their own internal consensus and governance mechanisms. When a sufficient number of participants in the swarm agree on the outcome of an event, they can generate and disseminate the information that collectively confirms this consensus. This represents genuine peer-to-peer agreement.
Seamless Mobile Integration
Advanced technologies such as threshold signatures, distributed oracles, and off-chain contracts need to be user-friendly and accessible in daily life. This requires simplifying the complex technical aspects and presenting them through a straightforward, intuitive interface.
To achieve this, these technologies will be integrated into the Peercoin Flutter Mobile Wallet. This mobile wallet is being developed to enable users to create and interact with discreet log contracts (DLCs) and form oracle swarms effortlessly.
About Peercoin Foundation
The Peercoin Foundation, a non-profit organization founded in 2018, is dedicated to promoting and supporting the ongoing education, development, and advancement of the Peercoin project. Our mission is to empower the Peercoin community by providing essential tools to sustain Peercoin’s distinguished reputation.
As an open-source decentralized ledger, the Peercoin blockchain network operates without a governing body. The Peercoin Foundation does not claim any intellectual property rights over the Peercoin project unless explicitly stated.
This foundation was entirely funded by community donations.
Website — https://www.peercoin.net/
Foundation — https://www.peercoin.net/foundation
Twitter — https://twitter.com/PeercoinPPC
Blog — https://www.peercoin.net/blog/
Forum — https://talk.peercoin.net/
Telegram — https://telegram.me/peercoin
Discord — https://discord.gg/m294ReV
Contact Information
Email: foundation@peercoin.net
Disclaimer: The information contained in this press release is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or a solicitation to purchase or invest.
The price of Peercoin can be extremely volatile and can fluctuate rapidly in response to market conditions. Before making any investment decisions, you should carefully consider your investment objectives, level of experience, and risk tolerance.
