Ultrain CEO Guo's In-Depth Dialogue With Tech Community

NEW YORK, April 5, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- On March 27, 2019, the co-founder and CEO of Ultrain, Rui Guo, had an extensive and in-depth conversation with a leader in the blockchain community, Gu Qing Feng, the CEO of Lianshi Technologies and the CTO of BTC Media APEC. Gu asked a series of questions to Guo on the latest development of Ultrain. Community members with a strong interest in Ultrain's technical details participated in this online dialogue.    

GU: Amongst other public chains that use VRF, such as Algorand and Dfinity, how does Ultrain differentiate itself?

GUO: We are all trying to achieve performance capable of commercial practices while ensuring safety, security and complete decentralization.

However, please note that high TPS is not the only indicator here but also the confirmation time. A transaction needs to be confirmed quickly. We can find that there are many public chains out there with impressive TPS but with confirmation times of about 10 minutes. Imagine a user visiting a web page and it takes 10 minutes to load. This is a business scenario that is difficult for users to accept.

I think there are two different approaches to achieving security: decentralization and high TPS. One similar to Algorand is the "confirm first, then produce" approach, which is based on VRF and BFT algorithms. Another approach, similar to Dfinity, is the "block is first confirmed" approach, based on BLS and VRF. These two methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. From a commercial point of view, we chose VRF and BFT.

But compared with Algorand, Ultrain has made more innovations in consensus and sharding.

1. The random selection of the Algorand consensus is probabilistic. The number of members selected during each round of the committee changes and brings about the possibility of multiple network storm problems of the proposer, and the bandwidth consumption of the node itself is high. In the case of Ultrain, the number of members is fixed in our consensus mechanism, RPOS, which effectively solves this problem.

2. Algorand's consensus does not involve incentives. It assumes that 2/3 of the machines are owned by good actors without malicious intent. Those strict conditions must be met, but no reasonable incentive is in place to ensure this. Ultrain's RPOS has a complete incentive mechanism design.

3. Ultrain introduces a complete sharding mechanism for computing and storage that is now under continuous testing. It is expected to be launched in mid-to-late April. Ultrain's improvements to communication between shards and the feature of random scheduling of mining rigs between shards have realized the linear expansion capability of the network's resources, while fully guaranteeing security, ensuring the function of our business model. These features are not currently available on Algorand.

You can download our latest technical yellow book at https://ultrain.io/paper to learn more about our technical details.

GU: In the scenario of commercial applications, and assuming I am a company that intends to transform its existing business with blockchain, how long does this process take?

GUO: We can provide different levels of service depending on the depth of the enterprise's application of blockchain. If the company is familiar with blockchain technology, has designed its own blockchain business model and has its own technical team, then our official website has SDK documentation for its use.

If the company lacks technical capabilities, our third-party partners can provide blockchain technology services to help enterprises with development.

If the company only has a preliminary understanding of blockchain technology and believes that blockchain can be a solution but is not clear on how to do it, Ultrain also provides blockchain business model consulting services to provide enterprises with innovative business models. We are creating a one-stop service for clients.

GU: Zero-knowledge is one of the key highlights of Ultrain. Can you elaborate on Ultrain's zero-knowledge proof scheme and how to use it for privacy protection?

GUO: Ultrain's zero-knowledge proof component allows contract developers to protect their data even in simple contract-level development. Technically, it can support arbitrary data and proofs of arbitrary logic, including model integration with machine learning. For example, models like CNN complexity are supported with our zero-knowledge proofs.

From a business point of view, various business scenarios, such as anonymity of sensitive case data, insurance customer information data, customer information in the supply chain, auctioned goods, voting, valuation of used cars, fund transactions, etc., can all be supported.

GU: Data privacy protection makes a lot of blockchain applications possible. For example, medical history and insurance data.

GUO: Yes, you are correct there. Otherwise, a lot of scenarios cannot be achieved.

GU: How do you define the concept of trusted computing? What is the difference between trusted computing and smart contracts?

GUO: Ultrain provides enterprises with an IT service that we call "trusted computing." Trusted computing is based on blockchain technology and is an integration of distributed scheduling technology, resource management technology, micro-service technology and other core technologies to form the next generation of computing infrastructure. A completed, innovative calculation mode.

The core function of trusted computing is that, after enterprise data enters the trusted computing platform, the data cannot be tampered with, cannot be destroyed and is transparent to everyone, so you can naturally trust the data.

Since the core of trusted computing is blockchain technology, smart contracts are also a component of the trusted computing core technology stack. However, trusted computing is not only comprised of blockchain technology but includes scheduling, resource management, micro-service technology, which is the difference between the two.

GU: What attracts companies to use Ultrain, rather than other public chains, when choosing a blockchain service?

GUO: The goal of a trust management solution is to help companies achieve more revenue. In essence, trusted computing provides enterprises with the ability to build low-cost trust, based on blockchain technology, to allow partners in the upstream and downstream of the enterprise to trust each other, thus making originally impossible business models possible.

There are some specific examples that we will expand on later. First, let me elaborate on the advantages of Ultrain.

Ultrain is positioned as a commercial chain to provide trusted computing services to businesses. Ultrain is the Windows operating system for blockchain. Using Ultrain's high performance, low price, and privacy protection solutions, enterprise customers can use blockchain services in a one-stop, fast and cost-effective manner.

See our specifications:

1. High performance: Our TPS is 3000, 150 times that of Ethereum's, with a confirmation time of 10 seconds – 1/12 that of Ethereum's.

2. Low price: our use cost is 1/20 of Ethereum's.

3. Zero-knowledge proof solution. We are the only public chain in the world that can provide zero-knowledge proof solutions on a chain.

Therefore, when choosing a blockchain service, companies see us as a very reasonable choice.

GU: What is Ultrain's target market? Can you give three examples? What do you think Ultrain can do for businesses in terms of business model improvement?

GUO: While providing technical services, we also provide design services for business model upgrades. We serve a wide range of industries and are now commercializing in retail, logistics, energy, health care, advertising, philanthropy, gaming and data markets. Let me give three examples of business model enhancements by applying Ultrain:

The first is an example of a carbon emissions trading based on blockchain, and we are working with a publicly listed company.

The company's main business is to provide biomass energy, which is to replace coal with a wood mixture as a fuel replacement. In the process of saving the environment, they can record carbon emissions saved and create carbon credits, which can be traded on the carbon emissions exchange, generating new income for the company.

The issue here is that the boilers they use are too small, are difficult to aggregate carbon savings to the required 500,000 tons of credit. Therefore, they need to collect all the emission reductions of the boilers after combustion and carry out batch transactions to carbon emissions exchanges.

But who is counting this data? If the company's own system counts it, the carbon emissions exchange will not recognize the authenticity of the data, because the company itself may modify it. If you find third-party statistics, third parties may collude with the company,

At this point, blockchain technology can solve this problem well. The company is equipped with an IoT device called a thermal mass spectrometer, which is used to record the number of boilers burned per day. Then the heat data of combustion is directly written to the Ultrain blockchain by the device.

Now, let me introduce the second example of one of our first customers: Yoho!

Yoho! is the largest streetwear, e-commerce trading platform in China. They launched a C2C sneaker trading platform, called UFO, earlier this year.

After purchasing sneakers, the seller sends the sneakers to the platform, where appraisers authenticate the shoes. After authenticity is determined, an anti-theft ID card is added to the shoes, and a tamperproof NFC chip is secured on the buckle. The shoe information and transaction data are uploaded to the Ultrain chain. After the buyer gets the shoe, the buyer can access the genuine information of the shoe with their mobile phone.

For buyers who want to trade the shoes again, there is a significant incentive to do this, since it will preserve the shoe's value. This is a free platform that saves market costs for goods and achieves better results through direct selling and blockchain.

In the third case, let me introduce you to the decentralized board game that we cooperate with, the Electric Soul Blockchain Laboratory – Unitopia.

Online games' core limitation is the issue of fairness. Since the games are run on a server provided by the game developer, the game developer has the ability to control variables. For example, the order of the cards in poker greatly influences the outcome of the game. In online Texas hold'em games, you will find that getting an AA happens more often than in offline games

To solve this concern, Ultrain and Unitopia jointly developed a blockchain Texas hold'em game. The biggest feature of the game is that the program is not control by a centralized server but a smart contract on the blockchain. Because blockchain technology cannot be falsified and is transparent to everyone, card order cannot be controlled by game developers and is completely random.

GU: How do you solve the problem of data storage when you are on the Ultrain chain?

GUO: Storage space on the Ultrain chain is still limited. When the data is stored, the cost is still high. We have two solutions: 1. Distributed storage model 2. IPFS-based approach. We have corresponding technical reserves in both aspects.

In the end, Gu completed this dialogue by thanking Guo for his time and the community members eager to ask more questions to further their understanding of Ultrain. In the end, Guo also mentioned that Ultrain's mainnet will launch by April 15, and the community members demonstrated a strong interest and are looking forward to that day.

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SOURCE Ultrain