The DApp Hub Of Polkadot

Unbiased notes of Dotsama Ecosystem

In collaboration with WagMedia and PolkaHaus

General Info

This article is intended to provide information about Astar only which is a parachain of Polkadot. The canary network on Kusama (Shiden) could potentialy be researched in another post in the future. Part 1 is focused on the core features of the project and some general info, while Part 2 will focus on Team/backers and tokenomics. Astar (ex Plasm) is a Layer 1 smart contracts platfrom which recently won a parachain slot in Polkadot, currently on mainet, with the folowing mission:

To provide a scalable, interoperable, and decentralized application platform that defines and realizes the new form of the web: Web3.0.

• Token: ASTR
• Trading: yes ( check here for exchanges) * Karura first priority when XCM is live.
• Total supply: 7.000.000.000
• Current supply: 1.500.000.000
• Parachain Lease period: December 17, 2021 - October 20, 2023
• Slot won: 4th ( over 10mil DOT locked/loaned)
• TVL: ~$500mil (450 mil staked +50 mil on Defi)
• Mcap: ~$185 mil
• Fully Dilluted: ~$850 mil
• Inflation: 10% annualy
• Pools: 33
• Holders : ~54000
• Transfers : ~ 500000
• Github:

• Twitter: 180k followers
• Telegram: 26k
• Discord: 90k
• Educational hub for astar: Take a look here.
• Audited by Quantstamp: Read this
• Web 3 Grants:

Plasma module on Substrate (delivered) ink! playground grant (delivered) Optimistic Virtual Machine grant (In progress) ECDSA implementation grant (delivered) ECDSA for hardware wallet grant (delivered) ZK Rollups and Plonk grant (In progress)

They started and working on Astar project since 2019, so not early in social media, but CT shilling/influencers is non existant while the team is fairly active in Twitter and discord. Tech heavy with low amount of general hype, although interesting NFT and Defi (more on that later) projects emerging in Astar ecosystem.

What Is Astar?

Astar Network is an open source, scalable and interoperable infrastructure for Web3.0. Scalability is obviously one of the most crucial demands dApp developers have. Ideally, the developers can build whatever applications on Astar Network without having to consider its scalability. A scalable smart contract platform on Polkadot supporting cutting-edge layer 2 solutions. It is built on Substrate and designed to be a Polkadot Parachain. Blockchains do not scale by design because of the decentralized consensus mechanism. TPS (Transaction Per Second) is much smaller than a centralized database and there is an upper limit of data that can be stored in every block. Astar: More Transaction Per Second (TPS) Cheaper transaction cost Faster finality As far as interoperability, Polkadot is a sharded protocol that enables blockchain networks to operate together seamlessly. So Astar solves prominent issues: scalability and interoperability.

History ( Plasm into Astar Rebrand)

They have been developing Plasm from 2019 and initially, the focus was solely to implement Layer 2 technology in Polkadot, but their vision was expanded. Layer 2 is now just one element in their innovative development pipeline. Currently, the platform is a dApp hub that supports Etherem Virtual Machine, WebAssembly, and layer2 solutions. This new brand name (Astar) will be used for Polkadot Parachain, and the network deployed once they won the Polkadot Parachain auction. In simple words, they decided to change the name to Astar because of the almost complete accord with the L2 scalability solution for Ethereum (Plasma) which also doesnt support smart contracts and to avoid confusion.

Core

Astar platform supports or aims to support in the future, Layers 2 solutions such as Plasma,OVM, ZK rollups as well as EVM and WASM building X-VM module. Also, in order to attract developers into their ecosystem, a unique incentive is introduced, called Dapp Staking. Lets look at them one by one:

DApp Staking

Dapp staking is building an incentive for developers to join their ecosystem as early as possible. The earlier they join the ecosystem, the quicker they can win market share and receive higher rewards from protocol. Users can choose to nominate their Astar tokens on the project. These users are also known as nominators. At every block, half of your block rewards go to dApp staking. This reward is further divided into a 50/50 ratio between operators (developers) and nominators. 25% of total block rewards is a huge incentive for dApp developers to build in the Astar ecosystem. In other blockchains like Ethereum, dApp developers need to apply for grant programs, issuance of tokens, fundraising, etc. to earn some money. In the Astar ecosystem, as long as your dApp has been nominated, you will receive some basic income. As your dApp grows in popularity, more members of the community will nominate you and this means that you will receive a greater percentage of the block reward!

We’re preparing for a network effect. The more dApps that are created, the more tokens will be locked on Astar. This creates a positive feedback loop on the price of $ASTR. The higher the price, the more money you can distribute to developers. Therefore, we can incentivize more developers. Thus there will be more dApps, then the price of $ASTR grows, etc.

To make the long story short, developers in the ecosystem can earn tokens while making smart contracts or infrastructure. The most important people in the blockchain ecosystem are always the developers because they actually create values on the top of the protocol. However, it is also the developers who are not getting enough return on their contributions. (e.g., very crucial service providers and other projects that didn’t issue tokens) Astar Network solve this problem through dApp staking.

DApp Staking is the reason why we will win. Astar natively supports financial incentives for developers to make dApps and build infrastructure. (Basic income for all developers aka dApp Staking).

In summary, devs can earn ASTR tokens by making products, which is based on their performance and decentralized governance.

Layer 2 Scaling

In general, Blockchain scaling solutions currently existing are:

• Segwit: Fixing transaction malleability by removing the signature information and storing it outside of the base transaction block.
• statechannel: Combining off-chain transactions among particular users and only the final state is committed to the main blockchain.
• Sharding: Allowing many more transactions to be processed in parallel at the same time by making shards.
• Plasma: Storing transactions in separate child chains and only the root hash is stored in the main chain.
• OVM The new scalability stack for Ethereum
• zkrollups: ZKRollup is an L2 scaling solution in which all funds are held by a smart contract on the main chain.

Layer 1 (horizontal) scalability: do more on the layer 1 blockchain. (e.g. sharding and Segwit) Layer 2 (vertical) scalability: do less on layer 1 and more on layer 2 or off-chain. (e.g. Plasma and State Channel) the blockchain model may evolve, where layer 1 is used as the trust layer, and layer 2 is the transaction layer. Scalability is the greatest challenge to all blockchains. To bring widespread adoption of blockchain technology, higher performance is necessary. Scalability is a critical issue that Astar Network seeks to optimize.

Plasma:

Polkadot is a highly scalable network by spreading transactions across multiple parallel blockchains. , Some of these use cases need tremendous transaction throughputs on a parachain. Astar makes it possible to build use cases that require high performance without sacrificing decentralization. Plasma is a scaling solution which has a hierarchical structure. It is a framework that allows the creation of child chains that use the main chain as a trust layer. Some parts of Plasma technology could be used for Polkadot2.0 where a relay chain connects to another relay chain, providing infinite scalability. If we can make a bridge between Astar parachain and another blockchain (e.g., Ethereum), it brings tremendous value to the ecosystem because Plasma provides a secure and trustless solution to move assets from A to B through plasma child chain.

OVM

The OVM (Optimistic Virtual Machine) is a virtual machine designed to support all layer 2 protocols. It is a possible unification of all layer 2 protocols meaning: Astar Network will not only be for Plasma applications but also for Lightning Network applications or any other layer 2 protocols.

ZK-Rollup

Astar's vision is to become a smart contract platform that supports rollups for both Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), WebAssembly (Wasm), and hoping to expand this in the future. What is a Rollup?A Rollup is an off-chain aggregation of transactions inside an Ethereum smart contract, which reduces fees and congestion by increasing the throughput of the blockchain from its current 15 tps to more than 1,000 tps. Within the smart contract, users can transact with security guarantees. ZK-Rollup is an L2 scaling solution in which all funds are held by a smart contract on the main chain, while it performs computation and storage off-chain where the validity of the side chains is ensured by zero-knowledge proofs. For every Rollup block, a state transition zero-knowledge proof (SNARK) is generated and verified by the mainchain contract. This SNARK includes proof of the validity of every single transaction in the Rollup block ZK-Rollup strictly inherits the security guarantees of the underlying L1.

X-VM (Cross Virtual Machine)

In this section, we checking X-VM (Cross Virtual Machine) of Astar. Their vision for X-VM is to establish a layer of abstraction that allows smart contracts to execute calls and read storage data from different contract engines (virtual machine) and languages (ex, interacting with Solidity dApps written in from ink! or vise versa) within the same blockchain.

X-VM is a native module that can unify the various contract engines, like how the OVM unifies the layer 2 protocols.

WebAssembly is undoubtedly superior for smart contract execution. WASM-based engines have a bright future as many great developers like patract lab are making WebAssembly easier for developers to use on Polkadot. However, they see still value in EVM, as staying close with the latest developments of Ethereum’s layer2 solutions like Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups. They have already started implementing the Rollups in the Plasm Ecosystem, supported by Web3 Foundation Grant Program. Adding on to this, most new developers will start from learning Ethereum. Established projects will want to maintain their current workflow on Ethereum, and the mainstream will be exposed to the world of blockchains through dApps on Ethereum.

We treat all dApps as equal. Therefore, we aim to support both WebAssembly and Ethereum Virtual Machine on Plasm & Shiden Network by making them interactive. We see a future where EVM can be looked at as another framework for making dApps alongside ink!, HyperLedger Fabric, EOSIO, and future virtual machines.

As Astar aims to become the hub for dApps on the Polkadot ecosystem, they see the need to add syntactical and functional support for both WASM-based contracts and EVM-based contracts. For example, if ink! contracts are more popular in the Polkadot ecosystem, the ability to call ink! contracts from a contract written in Solidity will be crucial. Projects that wish to fully leverage the capabilities of Substrate’s native modules, XCMP, and features from other Parachains will have to switch from Solidity to ink!.

Similar to the long transition from Ethereum 1.0 to Ethereum 2.0, we understand that migrating to a new environment while maintaining backward compatibility is not an easy process. We see X-VM as a long-term project that can ease development in the vastly fragmented smart contract development environment we have today.

As a start, we plan to implement a Proof-of-concept version of the Substrate contract module call as an EVM precompiled contract for the Frontier library in Substrate. This will enable a one-directional contract call from EVM to ink!

WASM

WASM’s performance is very high. The language is built to be as close to native machine code as possible while still being independent. WASM massively reduces processing times in browsers because of the use of small binaries. This offers great scalability to potentially slow internet connections that want to use blockchain technology. WASM was developed so that code can be deployed in any browser with the same result. Contrary to the EVM, it was not developed towards a very specific use case. This has the benefit of a lot of tooling being available and large companies putting a lot of resources into furthering WASM’s development. WASM expands the use of languages to smart contract developers to include Rust, C/C++, C#, Typescript, Haxe, and Kotlin. This means developers can write smart contracts in whichever language they’re familiar with. On the other hand there are some known issues of WASM.

While some focus on bringing solutions to one developer family, Astar's main focus is on two kinds of families. The first family is blockchain developers, who build smart contracts with Solidity and are familiar with using Ethereum tools. Astar made all those tools available in their EVM environment for supporting the EVM developers.

The second developer family is those who want to build with Rust. The same language Substrate is made with the framework of Polkadot. Currently, Rust is the most used new language on Github, and more institutions and developers are discovering the power of Rust. Supporting WASM in the Astar ecosystem will bring a whole new wave of developers to the blockchain industry. Big institutions are other businesses that want to utilize the power of blockchain can now use their in-house developers to build smart contracts in WASM because they are already familiar with the language that can be compiled to WASM. What's so special about WASM? Because it's just an instruction format, the magic of WASM is that it can be used as a portable compilation target for other languages without sacrificing speed as you would have with transpiling. This includes languages like C++ and Rust, which can now run on the web when compiled to WASM. Using WASM for smart contracts will scale the use of blockchain in our daily lives. It will solve all the problems EVM is facing related to scalability.

Our lead developers in Astar will work closely with the Parity team on the contract pallet and their project Canvas, a future common good parachain, to improve WASM use inside the Polkadot ecosystem. Gavin Woods, co-founder of Polkadot, creator of EVM, and inventor of the Solidity language for writing smart contracts. He developed the ink! language for utilizing the design of Polkadot inside smart contracts. Ink! is a domain-specific language for writing smart contracts in Rust and compiles to WASM code.

Roadmap And Links

-> Here is a detailed roadmap for 2022 with key milestones.

-> Astar also working heavily to bridge Cosmos to Astar Network in Q1 through Octopus Network.

-> BSC and Polygon bridges

-> Gavin Wood about EVM/WASM

-> Forum for Builders Program and applications. And here the documentation.

-> Small guide from CEX into Astar eco/wallet.

What sort of DApps are live on Astar?

There are two projects (DEXes) live and approved by the team.

ArthSwap is a one-stop DeFi protocol aiming to become a leading DEX on Astar Network. Considered a native DEX. ArthSwap is the No.1 decentralized exchange with the largest community on Astar Network. Its main functions are swapping, staking, liquidity mining, and we plan to have more functions on the way! We are focusing on growth in the Astar Network ecosystem and are willing to optimize all the elements for Astar. ArthSwap is to Astar, as what Trader Joe is to Avalanche, as what QuickSwap is to Polygon, as what Uniswap is to Ethereum! $21,5M TVL (at the moment)

polkaEX is a cross-chain Dex and Launchpad on Polkadot with higher TPS and lower transaction. $1,5M TVL (at the moment)

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the Astar series!

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