Everscale is one of the most technologically advanced blockchains today, and that’s not just some marketing exaggeration. We’re developing a blockchain network that incorporates all of the blockchain innovations and concepts of recent years, and this makes Everscale a serious competitor among smart contract platforms. Its versatility gives it the potential to become a decentralized hub for lots of blockchains and resource-demanding applications such as GameFi, DeFi, supply chains, etc. Due to its dynamic multithreading and sharding technology, there’s always more room to add new nodes and shards to handle any load — and that’s something that no other blockchain can offer yet.
Everscale’s features:
- High scalability, 100,000+ TPS
- Low fees ($0.003)
- Sharding
- Zk-SNARKs protocol
- Private workchains
- EVM workchains with the capability to easily port Solidity smart contracts from other blockchains
- Bridges with Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Cardano, and Phantom, and the capability to be easily connected to any EVM-based blockchain
- Hidden bridge
- Drivechains
- Various DEXes
- Staking mechanisms
- Several NFT standards
- GameFi projects
- Lending platforms
- Crowdfunding platforms
- Decentralized identity
- DeNS services
- Various tools for institutional investors such as KYC and AML
In this in-depth article, we’re going to provide an overview of the ecosystem and features of Everscale so that readers can get a full understanding of why it is going to become one of the leaders of the blockchain industry in the future.
Ecosystem
Everscale has had a lot of teams working on its various aspects and products over the past two years. Here are some key contractors on the infrastructure and applications today, but there are more and more teams joining the network regularly:
- EverX, the team developing the core functionality and the most important network upgrades, such as the new SMFT consensus, new types of workchains, and the Ever Surf wallet;
- Broxus, another Everscale's core contributor. This company is also responsible for such products as EVER Wallet, Octus Bridge, FlatQube, and a number of projects in DeFi, GameFi and privacy;
- Svoi.dev, developers of EverLend, EverStart, and Scale Wallet apps;
- ITGold, a team specializing in NFT-related standards and NFT marketplaces.
Everscale has a grants program to attract new developers who are launching products that add value to the ecosystem. We’ll take a quick glance at these projects, but first of all, let’s go deeper into how Everscale operates in terms of its architecture.
Everscale’s architecture
The blockchain consists of a Masterchain and a multitude of shards, called workchains. A new workchain can be added anytime when the capacity of all the current workchains is 90% utilized, to prevent even the slightest congestion. The Masterchain contains all block proofs from all the workchains in the network, so the security of the network depends on it, similarly to Polkadot and Ethereum 2.0. Each workchain is a separatчe blockchain with its own set of validators, rules, and data, which uploads its proofs to the Masterchain.
Validators are nodes that produce blocks both on the Masterchain and workchains. Each validator has to lock more than 350,000 EVER to join the network and be able to produce and validate blocks. If a validator acts maliciously, i.e., tries to send incorrect blocks, the stake of that validator will be slashed.
Everscale has both sharding and multithreading in its architecture. To date, it’s the only blockchain with both features, which allows it to scale effectively. When a new validator node joins Everscale, it gets assigned to a workchain and to a thread. A workchain is a shard, as we already know, so the validators of that shard don’t have to process data of the whole network. They handle only a limited amount of data, so the overall throughput of the network is the cumulative amount of transactions that the shards are able to process.
Multithreading solves another problem. Let’s imagine two dApps — a small application for wrapping tokens that is used from time to time, and a popular DEX with thousands of users. The processing power required by these dApps is very different, and a thread executing the smart contracts for this DEX can simply get overloaded with too many requests, resulting in slow performance. That’s why every validator of a workchain is assigned to a thread. Different groups of validators execute different sets of smart contracts, and every thread could split into two.
SMFT protocol and security
Sharding and multithreading allow the network to scale almost infinitely. How is it possible to ensure that nobody tries to send an incorrect block to the Masterchain, though? To achieve greater security, Everscale implements a variant of the Proof-of-Stake consensus model called the Soft Majority Fault Tolerance (SMFT) protocol.
To prevent false blocks being propagated, the SMFT Protocol requires every block sent to the network to be verified:
- First, a thread collator, i.e., the validator proposing a new block, sends it to all nodes of the workchain.
- Then, some nodes of the workchain, called Broadcast Protectors (BP), ensure that the block has been sent to 51% of validators and send this info to the Masterchain.
- The validators then randomly chooses a number of Verifiers, which has to verify that the block is correct and then also submit the proof to the Masterchain.
All malicious nodes attempting to corrupt the network can be financially punished for their actions at any step: the collator can have their stake slashed for submitting an invalid block, validators can have theirs slashed for not sending the proof of receiving the block, and the verifier could lose a part of their stake for not sending a verification message. The probability of an attack being successfully performed requires the majority of nodes to be malicious — because it’s impossible to calculate which node is going to become a verifier. The best strategy for all validators who want to keep their stake intact is therefore to stay honest. The SMFT protocol thus makes Everscale comparable only to Bitcoin in terms of security.
Other future workchain technologies
In addition to regular processing workchains, Everscale will have two more types of workchains for different tasks: drivechains and EVM workchains. Also, the regular workchains will be able to use zk-SNARK cryptography in the future. All of it is work in progress, planned for release in 2022.
Drivechains are workchains which serve as a means for permanent storage for the network, accessible by smart contracts and users too. The validators on drivechains provide space on their hard drives, and the availability and integrity of their stored data get checked all the time by the whole network by choosing random verifiers from the set of validators of other shards. If a validator fails to keep stored data safe, their stake gets slashed. Users and smart contracts pay for storage, so the drivechain validators are incentivized to safely store data and get rewarded for doing their job properly.
Drivechains can be used for a variety of things: storing resources for NFTs and game assets, creating indexes of blockchain data, archiving old blockchain data, keeping various business data and registries for supply chains, etc. It’s very hard to overestimate their utility.
Zk-SNARK technology is based on cryptographic proof that adds a significant level of privacy to transactions, because nobody can see the balances of users, participating in these transactions. This is the same kind of proof used in the Zcash network. It opens up the path to creating privacy dApps for business entities on Everscale that don’t want to expose their operations to anyone except for tax collectors. What’s more, it also makes it possible to create private DEXes and private wrapped versions of the network’s tokens. Zk-SNARK will be integrated in the regular workchains.
EVM workchains are designed to replicate the architecture of the standard Ethereum Virtual Machine, but with all the benefits of the Everscale network. Their purpose is to simplify the process of moving from other EVM-based blockchains to Everscale. Any EVM dApp can be ported to Everscale quickly with minimal changes, which may be a good thing for devs who are unfamiliar with Everscale smart contracts. And that brings us to the next topic.
Smart contracts and development
Everscale implements a unique approach to smart contracts. Other blockchains keep things simple: every wallet is associated with a public key, and it can contain a smart contract or some tokens. That’s not the case with Everscale, where every active address should have a deployed smart contract.
Let’s see how it works:
- The only way to create a usable Everscale address is to deploy a smart contract to it
- The wallet address is calculated by combining a user’s public key and the hash of the initial data including the code of the smart contract that we deploy there
- Given that we can deploy any number of smart contracts, a public key in Everscale can have millions of addresses associated with it.
This leads to a new blockchain development paradigm, called ‘distributed programming’. The old types of contracts, similar to ERC-20, BEP-20, etc. are becoming obsolete and bad practice. Such ERC-type smart contracts usually store a hashmap with all addresses and token balances for their respective tokens. Since every address on Everscale is a smart contract, it can handle all these functions on its own instead of calling the root contract, and use the whole blockchain to store data. During the deployment process, the root contract sends its code to the new address, and from that moment on, a newly deployed contract doesn’t need to request anything from its parent.
Even while it’s possible to write smart contracts in Solidity on Everscale, the distributed programming paradigm requires a different mindset from the developer. However, it gives the developer more capabilities, it makes the network more decentralized, and for those who can’t quickly grasp the idea of distributed programming, there will always be an opportunity to launch their products on EVM workchains.
In addition to the above, there’s one more tool for users to interact with the blockchain: DeBots. A DeBot is a simple program similar to a smart contract that is executed in a special environment (DEngine) on the user’s device. DeBots don’t have access to user’s keys and are very secure in general. Unlike Web3, DeBots don’t need any additional layer between users and Everscale. They can be used for a variety of things — games, wallets, etc. In case you want to explore this technology deeper, we wrote a separate article about using DeBots in Everscale.
EVER token and token standards
Anyone can launch their own token on Everscale. However, this approach can make life very hard for product developers — building a DEX with 100 different tokens would require integrating each token manually. That’s why the dev community decided to come up with several token standards used by all dApps across the network. The latest approved standard for utility tokens is TIP-3.1, while the standard for NFTs is TIP-4.
EVER is the native token of Everscale. Its total supply is 2,049,945,261 EVER, and it serves as a fee token and governance token. All fees go to validators for securing the network and producing blocks.
EVER is growing in popularity. It’s listed on the Gate.io and MEXC exchanges, as well as SushiSwap. It’s also possible to buy it via the Ever Surf wallet or on Changelly. Some of these exchanges feature the wrapped ERC-20 version of the token, called WEVER.
Users can stake their EVER coins in DePools via Ever Surf or the EverPools dApp. Alternatively, they can provide liquidity on FlatQube and receive farming rewards. We have a post about staking Everscale (EVER) if you want to know more.
DeFi and legal tools
With such advanced technology, it’s no wonder that Everscale has a wide array of products built on top of it, from GameFi to legal tools for institutional investors. We’ll list them all here.
EVER Wallet, Ever Surf, Everspace, and Scale Wallet are the four main wallets working with the EVER coin and the TIP-3.1 standard of tokens in Everscale. Everspace and Ever Surf also support transferring non-fungible tokens (NFT). For further information, read our detailed guide on crypto wallets for the Everscale blockchain.
FlatQube is the main decentralized exchange (DEX) of Everscale, built by the Broxus team. Its list of tokens includes EVER+WEVER, USDT, DAI, USDC, WBTC, WETH, some tokens of the ecosystem, and several memecoins.
Octus Bridge is a bridge connecting Everscale with Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, Fantom, and Milkomeda. Solana, Tezos, and some rollups are coming soon!
Octus Bridge can be easily connected to any EVM-compatible chain. What’s more, it can act as a hidden bridge connecting two blockchains, whose users won’t ever know there’s an additional layer in their transaction. Everscale can thus serve as a blockchain hub for a multitude of blockchains. It’s currently one of the few blockchains connected to Cardano.
Adaever is yet another bridge developed by Broxus and based on the technology of Octus Bridge. It’s one of the easiest ways to transfer liquidity from Cardano to other major blockchains.
EverLend is a lending platform where users can provide their liquidity to others in a decentralized way and earn interest on it.
EverStart is a launchpad platform for token sales of projects building on Everscale.
One of the most important things for large institutional entities, such as banks and centralized exchanges that have to comply with regulations are tools that can confirm the origin of the funds they work with. Everscale has two projects of this kind: AML Crypto and Spatium.
The first one is a tool for analyzing the origin of funds on Everscale — it can be integrated into any exchange to help it determine whether to accept deposits from certain addresses or not.
The second one, Spatium, is a multichain whitelabel solution which can be integrated into any financial service to get access to a wide range of crypto assets. It’s completely legal, and regulators consider it as a non-custodial solution. That’s why the number of its users is growing exponentially over time. Everscale is going to be fully integrated with Spatium in June 2022.
NFTs, GameFi, and metaverses
In addition to DeFi, one of Everscale’s main focuses is getting into GameFi. Its scalability allows it to handle thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of TPS, which makes it the best candidate for hosting any kind of games with blockchain integrations. Various teams are currently working on developing pilot projects; the most interesting among these are:
Evercraft — a rendition of Minecraft with the addition of metaverse elements and NFT integrations. All resources in the game will be represented as NFTs and fungible tokens, and players will be able to trade with each other directly on the blockchain. It will also be possible to buy and sell in-game land. Evercraft will be released in summer 2022.
GameFi SDK — a development kit for integrating Everscale into any game, making it comply with the current TIP-4 NFT standard. By using this SDK, any developer team will be able to implement metaverse mechanics and add it to any kind of game, including AAA ones. FPS, MMORPG, open-world games, quests — the list goes on. Evercraft is the first implementation of GameFi SDK — what will be the next?
Rust Cup Game — a racing game using DeBot technology that doesn’t require any additional layer between the player and the Everscale blockchain. It is also going to be released in summer.
Fluker — a small but very useful project. It’s a tool for organizing tournaments in any competitive game, where all participants pay in EVER for their entry ticket, and the winners receive prizes in EVER. Fluker already supports PUBG. More games, such as Counter-Strike, League of Legends, DOTA, and many other titles are on the way to be added.
As a mature network in terms of technology, Everscale has its own NFT standard — TIP-4, and all new projects will be using this to achieve compatibility with the already existing products. One of these is GrandBazar, an NFT marketplace where users can buy and sell individual NFTs and collections.
Summary
Everscale features everything that a major blockchain needs to offer its users: decentralization, scalability of 100,000 TPS+, security, and a rich ecosystem of products. It’s friendly to new users, providing them with detailed documentation on all its aspects, and it has all the necessary DeFi tools, from staking and DEXes to bridges and lending platforms. Everscale will become a decentralized hub for other blockchains, being able to interact with them via the hidden bridge and DeBots, and the cost of such operations will be near to non-existent. The current transaction fee is around $0.003, and after the final consensus update in summer 2022 it will decrease even more.
Everscale will also become a strong competitor in the metaverse and GameFi industry, being able to handle any number of players, and the current WIP GameFi SDK project will simplify working with blockchain tools for non-blockchain devs.
Overall, Everscale is one of the most technologically advanced blockchains on the market, and it’s only a matter of time before it becomes as big as its competitors — Solana, Tezos, and Avalanche. The whole community is working on it every day, and together we’ll be able to get it to the top.
