A Parachain as a service..

Unbiased notes of Dotsama Ecosystem

In collaboration with WagMedia and PolkaHaus

General Info

Gear is a new Layer 1 smart contracts platform, currently in testnet, which aims to become a parachain in both Polkadot and Kusama. While their mission is not clear,

Our ultimate goal is to make the Gear platform perform better than any Layer 1 solution, and at the same time it must be secure, decentralized, and provide an entry point for the entire Polkadot ecosystem.

is the closest i could get. As for the title “ A parachain as a service” , it means that small projects (Layer 2 Dapps) can deploy on Gear without spending valuable resources. Around 6k followers in Twitter, no TG, with monthly development updates in Medium and a small Discord room mostly for tech stuff. So, social media awareness is very low, no hype which is good and due to the fact that no information is out about tokenomics, means we are early here. Not VC early, but early.

What Is Gear? Which Problem It solves?

Gear is an advanced WASM based smart contract platform, aiming to be a Polkadot and Kusama parachain, intended to be a tool for hosting Layer-2 smart contracts, that enables developers to deploy their dApps in under 5 minutes in the easiest and most efficient way possible. Gear’s platform will enable developers to build dApps on both Polkadot and Kusama, to take advantage of the benefits of their respective ecosystems, without the significant financial and time expenses developers have dealt with traditionally. The problem they are trying to solve is the lack of easy entry in Polkadot / Kusama ecosysstem. To become a parachain, you need a lot of resources – both financial and development. The difficulty is an extremely high entry cost, as alot of projects are competing against each other to win one of a limited number of slots. On top of that deploying as a parachain can be very time consuming, and in some cases it can even take up to a year.. The main engine of the Gear network is its smart contract module. Wi all smart contracts are WebAssembly programs that can be compiled in the developers’ programming language of choice such as Rust, C, C++ and many more. It ensures very minimal, intuitive and sufficient API for running both newly written and existing programs on multiple networks without having to rewrite them. Smart contracts are stored in the blockchain’s state and are invoked, preserving their state upon request. As a result, Gear provides a low barrier of entry for developers who are new to blockchain, and makes it much easier to experiment creatively with smart contracts. Smart contract architecture uses the actor model under the hood, and provides:

-Persistent memory for immutable programs -Asynchronous message handling -A minimal, intuitive, and sufficient API surface for blockchain context

As for which Dapps will run on Gear:

WebAssembly (WASM)

WebAssembly is a way to run applications in programming languages other than JavaScript as web pages. Essentially, WASM is just a virtual machine that runs on all modern browsers, but whereas in the past you were required to use JavaScript to run code in a web page, WASM makes it possible to run code in browsers with programming languages other than JavaScript. The WebAssembly Virtual Machine, or WASM for short, is proven to be faster than any alternative virtual machine because of technology peculiarities. The use of WebAssembly enables Gear’s smart contracts to compile directly into machine code and run at near-native speeds. Higher speeds means lower transaction costs and higher efficiency. All Gear programs and smart-contract are run as WebAssembly programs. This means for example, that developers can bring their applications to the web and achieve full performance with the apps’ full set of capabilities - that they’d typically have when running native on Windows or Mac - in a web browser. The developers won’t actually have to write the WASM code directly either. Instead, they’d use WASM as a compilation target for programs written in other languages. The main problem that WASM solves is the inability to use programming languages other than JavaScript on the web. Although JavaScript is a great programming language, it wasn’t designed to be super fast in large applications. WebAssembly has the following advantages:

• WASM is extremely fast (because it translates to actual hardware instructions), efficient and portable (It can run on any actual hardware). Code can be executed at near-native speed across different platforms. 
• WASM is also readable and debuggable. Although WebAssembly is a low-level language, it does have a human-readable text format that allows code to be written, viewed and debugged by hand. 
• It’s also extremely secure as it’s run in a safe, sandboxed environment and like other web code, it will enforce the browsers same-origin and permissionless security policies.

 WebAssembly is a global industry technology for many reasons: It is co-designed and implemented by all major competitors in its field. Its design and release follow the formalization of full mathematical and machine verification. All in all, WebAssembly is a game-changing technology. It combines highly optimized code with very small binaries that enables large applications to run very fast and smoothly via the web. This improved efficiency, combined with the possibility of user interaction without download or installation processes is why WebAssembly is being called “the future of the web”. In addition, for smart contract interactions, Gear uses the actor model for communications approach, which is parallelizable and shardable by design. This enables the utilization of various language constructs for asynchronous programming, which significantly streamlines the asynchronous processing of transactions. This enables the running of dApps that support business logic of any project in the decentralized Gear network very, very quickly.

If you are interested to compare WASM VM vs EVM read here If you are interested to learn more about WASM languages read here

Gear IDEA And Why DOT

Gear IDEA is a convenient tool for writing, compiling and deploying RUST programs directly in the browser without additional configuration of the environment. This is the demo application that implements all the possibilities of interaction with smart-contracts in Gear. It provides the easiest and fast way to upload smart-contract to the blockchain network. Its mostly for marketing reasons imho and allows you to write a small program from browser and deploy it to current network. Regarding why they chose Polkadot,

Its a scalable infrastructure, easy interactions, scalability, customization flexibility. As we all know Ethereum recently faced scalability problem as we saw slow transaction processing and high fees. Polkadot works with multiple blockchains so loads can be distributed across separate networks. Each project included in the Polkadot ecosystem can create its own blockchain with flexible settings.

Gear vs Field

While Astar havent created their own engine and uses the same module of substrate WASM, Gear uses different design of how programs interact with each other. (more effectively). Compared to Moonbeam, significantly reduces transaction costs, is faster, and is more flexible, all thanks to its WebAssembly VM (virtual machine). Furthermore, unlike other smart contract platforms, Gear can scale according to the number of cores a typical validator in the network has (code execution architecture designed to be parallelizable). Speed is their greatest strength. WASM is 10 times faster than EVM. Transaction costs are also 10 times lower. This advantage is even more pronounced with their architecture - about 100 times faster (because of parallel computing).

Target And Future

The project is mainly focused to attract developers and anyone with passion for coding. These are their customers, users and partners..

We have to know that the number of developers in the blockchain space is still very limited. We allow developers who are not familiar with blockchain development to use common languages, that are already popular around the world, such as Rust, C, C++, thereby lowering the threshold for creating and deploying smart contracts. In addition, we are developing many templates and libraries for different applications, so that developers can choose an existing template, modify a few parameters, and easily deploy their applications.

Once fully deployed, Gear will be fully managed by token holders. The majority of tokens will be held by the community and incentivized teams. Gear will have a staking mechanism, so naturally running a node will also be encouraged. This means that by owning tokens and staking, the community will have governance. Still havent decided when exactly to go for crowdloan, meanwhile team opened an office in Silicon Valley, hired a team in China, and they are starting to grow their community there.  Also, a few workshops happened, a series of collaborative seminars with leading technology universities in the US, Russia, China and Turkey. This educational project is just getting started and it just keeps getting bigger.

We began to put a lot of energy into building a strong community, bringing together people who are interested in developing and joining the blockchain ecosystem. We will also be launching a grant program and an ambassador program soon.

After finishing the stable testnet, will run an independent security and economic audit to deploy the code on the Kusama network, which is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2022. As for Polkadot's Auction, nothing is ceratin until the full kusama onboarding happens (q3 2022) (?).

Team

CEO Nikolay Volf is the one who someone have to pay attention here. Has been one of the key developers of basic Polkadot technology and Substrate since 2015. As an initial member of the Parity Technologies team, he worked on multiple protocols in the blockchain space: Ethereum, Bitcoin, ZCash. Nikolay also led the first-ever implementation of WebAssembly smart contracts while working for Parity Technologies. Initial member at Parity, also made numerous contributions to Parity Technologies’ core technology and the substrate framework. Another notable member, Ilya Veller has 20+ years of experience working with HNWI and global hedge funds at Renaissance Capital, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America. Ilya raised over $1bln for various projects over the last 20 years. Several members cannot be found in Linkedin, the team consists of ~20 people in total.

Backers

According to this , 12 mil raised, which sounds like a good number, mainly by Blockchange Ventures. Other VCs also spoted including Three Arrows Capital, Lemniscap, Distributed Global, LAO, Mechanism Capital, Bitscale, Spartan Group LLC, HashKey, DI Ventures, Elysium Venture Capital, Signum Capital and P2P Economy lead by Konstantin Lomashuk, along with a number of top executives of Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies. Apparently **Dr. Gavin Wood, Founder and CEO of Parity Technologies **is one of key individual investors participating in this round.

I am happy to support the Gear team with their infrastructure efforts — and I believe it will benefit our entire ecosystem

Final Thoughts

Obviously, this is ultra techy project aiming for developers, following the Dotsama path of developers->users->developers simple loop. Backers quite impressive to be honest, team very good in terms of quality and quantity, looking ready to build and innovate in the space. On the downside, the documentation is not yet finished, and no tokenomics anywhere. Also, CEO has not a track record showing that they can deliver, there is a trend here...(Dotsama is full of young ambitious CEO's but with not proven history of making multi million companies). Will Gear bring the much needed hype alongside tech or we gonna see a Shiden like price movement? What will be the utility of the token and why is needed APPART from staking/governance? Will WASM stand out as the best VM in the future?

These questions will have to be answered in order to have a better evaluation of Gear.

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