BLOCKv: State of the Platform Address

Introduction

The last 12 months have been busy ones for BLOCKv! The last year has seen us achieve some of our key goals for the BLOCKv platform, namely decentralising the Vatom network, solving the great scalability challenges and ensuring users of our technology could maintain a single identity across all BLOCKv partner platforms. We’d like to use this blogpost to share with you how we achieved these goals and share a small part of our vision for how BLOCKv can help shape the future. 

Solving the scalability challenges through decentralisation: How instantaneous and limitless scalability is baked into the BLOCKv platform

In order to fulfil our vision of the BLOCKv platform as the backbone from which partners can create and host the virtual objects of the new digital goods economy, we faced a twofold problem with scalability: existing limitations on numbers of transactions per second and providing data storage flexible enough to support high transactional loads. Whilst we had created a powerful digital ‘vehicle’, the Vatom, that acted as a programmable skeleton for the creation of digital goods, if they were to fulfil their potential we would need to address these issues. Firstly, with this increasing usage we will need to be able to handle a very high number of concurrent transactions per second. Existing permissionless blockchain platforms such as Ethereum, whilst powerful, can currently only handle around a few hundred or few thousand transactions per second. For comparison, the industry leader in transactions per second, Visa, can apparently handle around 65,000 transactions per second. For Vatoms to become feasible as a standardised unit we needed to create a system that could handle transactions per second way above this. This presented a huge challenge when it comes to compute and network infrastructure provisioning, as well as data processing, storage and management. These challenges would all have to be met whilst remaining cost effective. Secondly, to fulfil our goal of decentralising the Vatom network BLOCKv had to decide whether to go down the route of an open permissionless network, similar to Ethereum, or create our own provisioned network, like Hyperledger. Current permissionless blockchain networks allow anyone to join their platform, but rely on the deployment of consensus algorithms and systems such as incentivised proof of work as a trust layer, a time and hardware intensive process that severely limits transactional speed.

For BLOCKv’s decentralised Vatom network we chose to utilise a selective endorsement process, instead of a public permissionless blockchain, that relies on consensus between trusted partners to maximise transaction speed and scale. Anyone can join the Vatom network, subject to the passing of our requirement levels, agreement to license terms, payment of an on-boarding fee and the staking of VEE tokens. We can now proudly say that the Vatom network is decentralised and is currently already operating with partner companies such as Vatom Inc. and Smart Media Tech. The flexibility and scalability provided by running on a decentralised provisioned network, as well as the transactional architecture of each BLOCKv platform within the network allowed Vodafone to run an award winning campaign on the BLOCKv platform in March 2020, in which user interactions peaked at a rate of 10,000 requests a second. 

In order to maintain the consensus between ledgers that makes blockchain technology so secure, these network partners’ transactions are recorded in a secondary BLOCKv ledger, which acts as a trust layer for instantaneous comparison, ensuring consensus and maintaining the integrity of transactions. Whilst Vatoms are emitted on BLOCKv’s own permissioned platform, this does not mean we do not support permissionless blockchain functionality and the benefits they provide. Any Vatom can be serialised as an Ethereum, EOS or other blockchain based NFT, through an asynchronous transaction. For BLOCKv’s campaign with Doritos, where users could win a highly desirable Sony Playstation 5 Vatom that was redeemable for an actual console, these higher value Vatoms were also placed on Ethereum as an additional trust layer. With this approach, companies utilising the BLOCKv platform benefit from both the high transactional load capabilities of BLOCKv’s permissioned, high-speed architecture platform and the additional, optional functionality of hosting asynchronous Ethereum-backed Vatoms on the public blockchain.

As we previously mentioned, whilst a provisioned network approach helps to remove the decentralisation bottlenecks, true seamless scalability is only possible if all platforms within the network can seamlessly scale as and when needed. For that purpose,BLOCKv had to ensure that the data storage system necessary to support this infinitely scalable transaction load was fit for purpose and able to perform up to potentially millions of transactions per second. Instead of either scaling up or scaling out in size, our platform had to be able to perform both, simultaneously and seamlessly. Current market offerings for this level of data storage were either bound by their own system limits on how many concurrent transactions they could run, or by their ability to only scale effectively with prior knowledge of key/partitioning patterns. Attaching these limitations to the BLOCKv platform was not acceptable due to the intrinsic data structure of a Vatom, so we had to create our own data path that could store Vatoms in a manner that was fast, very scalable and also transaction safe for both users and partners. BLOCKv’s current cluster can already perform up to 50,000 transactions a second. We achieved this by leveraging an existing clustered file system technology and enriching it with a Vatom specific VFS-layer, which also provides transactional integrity.. Modifications that affect multiple Vatoms, such as state changes, can be batched together and sent within a single transaction. This transactional figure is currently limited only by the amount of compute power and disks we have assigned to it, the method itself we believe allows us to scale seamlessly to truly millions of transactions per second. 

How our filesystem design allows the platform to scale seamlessly

One identity to rule them all: decentralising the network whilst maintaining user’s unified identity and wallet 

Whilst we were keen to move BLOCKv away from its previous centralised state towards a truly decentralised Vatom network, we did not want decentralisation to come at the cost of losing our user’s unified wallet and identity layer. Whilst digital goods have today completely permeated our world, we believe that the lack of interoperability between platforms has severely hindered the development of a singular virtual goods economy. In order to solve this, above all else, a user has to be provided with a sense of true ownership of the unique digital objects they collect, irrespective of the platform they received them on. We call this concept reality synchronization and we believe it is completely integral in recreating that unique sensation of being the physical owner of an object in the real world, within the digital sphere. Therefore, we had to ensure users could maintain a persistent, cross-platform user identity and inventory. Using BLOCKv’s federalised identity service, a user can create, interact with and maintain different profiles on multiple partner companies’ platforms completely frictionlessly, whilst maintaining a single overarching BLOCKv identity. This ensures that whilst the user may interact with BLOCKv’s platform through a variety of different mediums such as multiple apps or websites, they remain the ultimate owner of their Vatoms. This is how BLOCKv has created truly ownable and unique digital objects.

Conclusion 

With fields like virtual and augmented reality now really starting to break through into mainstream consumer markets, it’s an exciting time to be creating a future where permanently owned digital goods are the norm! We hope you’ve enjoyed reading about the progress we’ve made and have ignited some excitement about where BLOCKv is headed.