In the end of August 2024, representatives of Broxus, the core developer of Everscale, stepped up to answer questions from the community about the major events within the ecosystem, and plans for the future. Speakers of the AMA session were Sergey Shashev, Vladislav Ponomarev, and Sergey Dzhurinsky. We present to you the recap of this talk.
Two Milestones
In the beginning of the conversation, Broxus founder Sergey Shashev summed up the main achievements Everscale saw lately.
First, the team has successfully consolidated to the network treasury and formed a new Governance Board, completing the major governance reform of the ecosystem.
Sergey Dzhurinsky underscored the pivotal role analysts from Warp Capital, a current member of the Governance Board, played in finding and retrieving all inactive addresses with treasury funds, as well as in making data on the structure of treasury and EVER in circulation transparent and regularly updated. The new governance is focusing on attracting new partners for performance-based commitments. One proposal is currently being discussed within governance, which Sergey Shashev explained further.
Shashev also outlined the main technical achievement. A new consensus protocol that Broxus had been developing over the past three years (a couple years was spent on a component base, and another year for assembling the protocol), has been recently deployed in the testnet. It is compatible with Everscale’s virtual machine (TVM) and brings some major improvements to the consensus mechanism.
According to Shashev, by designing this protocol, developers finally managed to achieve the state of fast finality in Everscale. First tests show that the new protocol performs significantly better than any other TVM network.
If testing will conclude with adding the protocol to the mainnet, all users of Everscale will notice reduced transaction finality times and smoother performance. The protocol was designed to process many concurrent transactions while improving the speed of complex on-chain operations, e.g., DEX swaps.
Broxus CEO Vladislav Ponomarev added that the new protocol will be especially useful for the high-demand dapps, such as Web3 games. Thus, Everscale will resolve most technical issues for various types of businesses that currently prevent them from using the blockchain tech.
The First Treasury-Based Commitment
Shashev said that, after forming the new governance, there is already a first commitment proposed to the Board by its members Slava Semenchuk, Olamit, and Broxus. Currently, the number of active addresses in Everscale is too low compared to competitors.
The proposal is aimed at increasing the number of active wallets 100-fold over the next 3 months by introducing and promoting web3 gaming projects in Everscale with popular mechanics, including tap games and lotteries.
Korean Crisis: “No Risk for the Network”
One question from the community related to the events in South Korea that took place at the end of the last year, where a group of malefactors came into possession of a large amount of WEVER tokens traded on local exchanges. To keep Everscale from this incident and prosecute the culprits, our community asked trading platforms to halt operations with WEVER, and started cooperating with Korean authorities. A new smart contract for the token was created, and its holders went through a swap procedure, successfully concluded in June 2024.
There is no longer a significant risk for the network from this case, Shashev concluded.
Sergey Dzhurinsky added that all the stolen cryptocurrencies were eventually returned to the network treasury, without a single token lost.
Venom Partnership
One community member reminded the participants that, just before the launch of the Venom network, plans were announced for teaching several teams of developers to work with TVM blockchains. He asked how many developers successfully completed this educational program, if it ever took place.
Shashev replied saying that tech experts from Everscale managed to teach at least three teams of 7-8 developers. He added that Venom has developed its own range of dapps not fully matching Everscale’s, which made it irrelevant to further prepare developers for Venom.
Broxus founder highlighted one specific project on the Venom blockchain, made in partnership with United Network: a full-scale payment system that includes crypto debit cards. According to Shashev, this project opens up new perspectives for Venom and is the most prominent example from its ecosystem.
Community Activation
Answering a question regarding the efficiency of initiatives aimed at Everscale community, such as Zealy quests, community manager Aleksander said they revive the discussion around Everscale and its ecosystem, not only attracting end-users but also more professional investors.
Sergey Dzhurinskiy followed-up, saying that Broxus is currently in talks with a company serving as liquidity provider for lending protocols, which was initially a member of the community.
Per Broxus founder, much experience in activating the community was received from quests in Venom network, with the last season bringing the long-awaited positive outcome. This experience will be used for heating up the activity in Everscale.
Biggest Trends in Crypto
Another question addressed to the participants asked for providing an outlook of the biggest trends in the Web3 industry. Sergey Shashev pointed out that the CBDC field that Everscale earlier made a bet on has not been developing as fast as he expected.
Yet, he focused on the blockchain tech advancement: Ethereum “slowly but surely” develops scalability solutions, such as rollups and zk-proof protocols. It is a major challenge for other blockchain platforms: if they will not be able to keep up, the entire space is under the risk of being completely taken over by Ethereum. One of the alternative solutions for better performance is the DAG blockchain consensus, which Everscale is developing.
One more trend, according to Shashev, is the rise of memecoin economy caused by the growing popularity of launchpads like Pump.fun on Solana and SunPump on Tron.
New EVER Exchange Listings
Speaking about the market for Everscale’s native coin, participants brought up a question from the community, which asked about the possibility of listing EVER on Binance. Shashev answered, saying there has been no such commitment proposed for the Governance Board yet. He also recalled the recent listing of EVER on the Indian-based crypto exchange CoinDCX.
Commenting on this topic, Vladislav Ponomarev emphasized a growing trend of global crypto trading platforms losing their significance due to regulatory pressures, potentially giving way to regional exchanges.
This trend complements the development of local blockchain communities. Ponomarev is convinced that Everscale’s new governance allows anyone to contribute to the network’s growth, whether through community building, facilitating local listings, or creating useful products.
Ponomarev invited local and regional entrepreneurs and community leaders to Everscale, promising support and rewards in exchange for clear commitments and actions.
Differences between Everscale and Venom
The second question addressed the difference between Everscale and Venom. Even though both are TVM blockchains, Venom has higher capacity than Everscale.
Vladislav Ponomarev gave several reasons. First, Venom uses a different consensus algorithm, Proof-of-Authority, which means that the network validation is only conducted by trusted, professional companies with sufficient hardware. Furthermore, Venom has more shards, which translates into higher network throughput.
REMP
A question was asked about the REMP and its commercial effect.
Ponomarev explained that REMP is a protocol designed to properly process incoming blockchain messages, ensuring that accepted messages are executed. This feature enhances the transparency and error-handling capabilities of the network.
While REMP itself is not a commercial feature, it improves message processing and increases user convenience and trust in the network. This protocol is a part of the broader Everscale protocol architecture, and commercial benefits can only be achieved by improving the entire system.
Mesh Network
Participants answered a question regarding the current progress in implementing the novel blockchain interoperability protocol dubbed Mesh Network, intended to seamlessly connect multiple TVM networks.
Ponomarev noted that the development of the Mesh Network technology is reported in the monthly updates on the Everscale node development. There was a major update regarding changes to the message format. A certain logic was also implemented to allow for the synchronization of message queues across different networks.
The next step, according to Ponomarev, is to implement what has already been discussed. It's not enough to simply create the protocol, the entire technical infrastructure around the protocol must also support changes without negatively impacting the blockchain’s performance. The next step in developing Mesh Network is to bring the blockchain infrastructure to the required state.
Fast Finality and SMFT
Speakers once again touched on the topic of fast finality, answering the question about SMFT, another technology in the works that addresses the problem of finality.
Vladislav Ponomarev said that fast finality is a challenge type rather than a single development.
One project within this direction is SMFT, which had been in development since around 2021, was implemented earlier this year and is currently being tested and upgraded in the mainnet.
Another one is the DAG protocol called Tycho, the latest solution aiming to speed up the consensus algorithm. Both approaches have made significant progress, and a testnet for the DAG protocol has been launched recently for practical testing. The team will then evaluate which method provides better performance and benefits the network the most.
TIP-5.1
CEO of Broxus Vladislav Ponomarev also answered a question about the TIP 5.1 standard in detail, as he is the author of this standard in the first place.
TIP-5.1 is inspired by Bitcoin’s BIP-21, which has been replicated in other blockchains, including Ethereum and Solana.
Per Ponomarev, the main goal is to make the process of sending and receiving transactions as simple as possible for the end user by creating a payment link that allows compatible wallets to immediately read and accept all the transaction details.
The key idea is to standardize how payment links are generated in various wallets so that QR codes can be created, and the wallets can easily recognize them. This opens up a wide range of possibilities for different businesses.
Ponomarev said that the standard will likely be implemented in major wallet apps on Everscale in the nearest future.
FlatQube
Community members asked a number of questions about the decentralized exchange on Everscale, FlatQube. Sergey Shashev returned to his talk about the commitment for increasing user activity in Everscale. In his view, the current user base is insufficient to work on any developments around dapps. Technically, they are already superior to alternatives in other networks. Still, the task of increasing the user activity comes first.
One potential development is creating a Telegram bot for trading on FlatQube. This app has an API, so it is theoretically possible.
Octus Bridge
Shashev hinted big changes are coming to the cross-chain protocol Octus Bridge, and asked the community to wait a little more time. He added that, technically, a cross-chain bridge between TON and Everscale has already been established. Moreover, there is a potential to connect a new version of the bridge to the Bitcoin network, as well. Two approaches are on the table: a bridge to the Lightning Network, or to a Bitcoin-EVM protocol.
Projects on Everscale
In the end of the AMA session, Sergey Shashev highlighted three blockchain projects built on Everscale that are not operated by Broxus:
- Wixi Exchange: a platform for trading cryptocurrencies and tokenized commodities with additional features like staking.
- Payler: a B2B provider of payment solutions, which runs several blockchain pilot projects on Everscale for online casinos.
- GemPION: a platform for competitive gaming and tournaments developed by GemHUB, a major Korean Web3 game developer belonging to the BPMG group.
