perlin
the project is in stealth mode, there is no info, but people can't stop talking about it. @perlinnetwork has had 19,000 subscribers before the first message was posted. but what exactly is perlin? we provide you with an exclusive look.
perlin was initially a decentralized aws ec2 competitor focusing on blind computing. after "snowflake to avalanche" paper was released they shifted their positioning to a scalable dag-based protocol built on avalanche consensus and armed with a parallel computation layer.
avalanche is a leaderless metastable consensus protocol presented by team rocket in may 2018. it operates in quorums instead of nodes which propagate confidence thresholds to other quorums. this reduces communication cost from O(n²) to as low as O(kn). the benchmarks have shown that avalanche can reach 1626 tps with 2000 validator nodes with a latency of 4.2 seconds.
avalanche's metastable property allows for some interesting features:
- decentralized governance with the ability to tune network parameters such as mining rewards.
- pruning the network state that has unanimous consensus.
the network consists of three types of participants:
- miners are suppliers of compute power. they allocate a certain amount of cpu and ram to virtual machine instances. perlin supports both docker and kubernetes for sandboxing thanks to gvisor.
- validators are participating in the consensus. perlin uses proof of stake with a rotating pool of 1024 validators.
- customers either connect to a miner's machine via ssh to find themselves in a familiar linux environment or run a prepared massively parallelized task on multiple miners.
perlin is intentionally designed without turing-complete smart contract support. instead, it supports primitives for building high-throughput off-chain systems. smart contracts can be written in languages that are compiled to webassembly. contracts support time-locks, resource-locks and signature-locks. transactions in perlin are asynchronous and eventually consistent.
perlin introduces a novel feature called diodon. basically it's a memory-hard cryptographic hash function that allows to determine that a supplier actually has a certain amount of cpu and ram.
when connected to the miner, both the customer and the miner must solve a cryptographic puzzle at a regular interval. if either party fails to do so, the miner will not get any payment and the customer will lose 5% of the amount they staked. this amount will go into a pool of unminted perls.
perlin takes privacy seriously. it provides numerous cryptographic primitives to perform homomorphic encryption, notably the fan-vercauteren ring learning with errors scheme. verifiability and correctness of computation is assured using a binary-search verification game similar to truebit.
perlin makes use of parallel computation similar to pipelining techniques seen in modern processors. even though a distributed system has much larger latency than a piece of silicon, the speedups are unbounded. everything that's fine with a few seconds of delay can run on perlin.