We, at Arkimedes Network, are on a mission to connect and build trust among enterprises, academia, and talented people to help them make better decisions. At its core, our Trustworthy Career Platform is being built on a set of smart contracts to (i) issue self-verifiable employment and academic credentials, and (ii) facilitate the creation of on-chain reputation. Initially on the Ethereum blockchain, Arkimedes Network has decided to deploy its (beta) smart contracts on Optimism, an Ethereum Virtual Machine equivalent Layer-2 (L2), while we begin building on the Polkadot / Kusama ecosystem.
The Challenge of Scaling
With blockchain technology demonstrating its utility across industries, traditional decentralized networks face unique challenges when compared to centralized ones. The CAP theorem, introduced by Eric Brewer in the late 80s, articulates that decentralized data stores, which includes blockchains, can only provide two out of three guarantees simultaneously: consistency, availability, and partition tolerance (CAP). This concept has evolved into the Blockchain Trilemma - as coined by Vitalik Buterin in 2017 - suggesting that public blockchains must inherently trade-off between security, decentralization, and scalability.
Unlike central network infrastructures, public blockchains operate using decentralized secure consensus mechanisms, which pose hurdles in achieving the desired balance with scalability. Acknowledging this challenge, Arkimedes Network is embracing Optimism and Polkadot as its first supported blockchains.
Optimism: General Purpose Rollup Solution
Optimism is a blockchain that extends Ethereum and increases its transaction throughput. As an Optimistic Rollup Solution, it moves computation off-chain, while keeping some data per transaction on-chain (in practice, the merkle root of the blockchain state) to detect fraud and enable the production of case-specific transaction batches. This takes the transactional burden off of Layer-1, and allows Optimism to spread network fees across transactions, while ensuring similar availability and integrity guarantees as the base layer.
In addition to this improvement in scalability and network fees, the implementation of EIP4844 in Ethereum will introduce a new transaction type that accepts ephemeral blobs of data, and expects to lower Layer-2 fees by 10-100x.
Polkadot: Multichain Vision for Web3
Polkadot - founded by Gavin Wood, former Ethereum CTO and creator of the Solidity programming language - is a fully-sharded blockchain that serves as a foundational layer (Layer-0) for a decentralized web. It achieves scalability by allowing apps, smart contracts, and services to securely communicate across parallelized chains.
In practice, Polkadot consists of a Network Protocol and a Relay Chain that coordinates specialized, optimized chains at Layer-1. By spreading transactions across the entire multichain network, Polkadot is expected to achieve speeds of more than one million transactions per second (TPS). Along with this improvement in transaction speed and interoperability, Arkimedes Network will also benefit from Polkadot built-in security without having to bootstrap a network of miners or validators.
High Energy Efficiency Network
Polkadot’s Nominated Proof-of-stake (NPoS) model has the lowest carbon footprint among comparable proof-of-stake protocols, using only as much energy as about 7 US households per year.
Wrapping Up
Through the adoption of Optimism and Polkadot, Arkimedes Network gains access to substantial improvements in interoperability, transaction confirmation times, fees and throughput to accommodate a larger user base without compromising performance and security.
As part of our commitment to offering a diverse range of choices to our users, we will expand our support for additional blockchains that meet the Arkimedes platform requirements, while we prioritize sustainable networks.
Interested in joining our Early Adopters Program? Get in touch to be among the first to start!