Recently, we hosted an AMA session with Sergey Shashev, co-founder of Broxus, and Vyacheslav Belenko, head of Everscale node development.
In this article, we would like to recap the AMA and discuss recent updates in Everscale’s technical and business development.
The current state of business and tech
In May 2023, the latest EVERPOINT event concluded. The conference brought together ecosystem teams, investors, and partners and featured different panel discussions related to Everscale, Venom, the synergy between networks, and the future of TVM blockchain technology.
Everscale is strengthening its position in the Korean market, and EVER has been listed on the major Korean exchange Bithumb. As Bithumb is one of the largest exchanges in terms of active accounts and users, this listing holds substantial weight in establishing EVER's presence in the market.
Touching on Everscale's tech stack, a recent update to the node mitigates potential vectors of attacks via malicious smart contracts. With the cooperation of all development resources from the EverX and Broxus teams, the developers are concentrating on shipping the latest Everscale innovations.
What is Everscale’s main business model?
The Everscale business model operates on a transactional basis, meaning more transactions, more gas usage, and so on. It implies new projects launching their tokens and adding liquidity into pools, farming incentives, etc. Essentially, it's vital to comprehend that Everscale functions in the open blockchain market, vying with other open blockchains like Ethereum, Polygon, Polkadot, and more. The selection of companies and projects to be launched on a specific blockchain is determined by the customers. Our role is to deliver the best tech and to explain why Everscale is better, as we are currently doing.
Cooperation between Everscale and Venom
Venom is the first regulated blockchain that has an ADGM license, requiring strict regulatory policy for projects to be launched. If any projects are waiting for regulatory approval, they can easily be launched on Everscale first, and then they will already have been battle tested in a live environment with real users.
What's the main value of Everscale compared to other TVM chains?
It doesn't matter if 20 more TVM chains appear – it will not negatively affect Everscale. First of all, Everscale is a public network that's already been live for three years, and it's ready for launching any products and experiments.
We don't need to think about other TVM chains as competitors. On the contrary – Ethereum is so popular because of other chains. The more TVM chains are launched, the stronger initial TVM chains will be.
What about FlatQube integration with Venom? Will there be a QUBE/VENOM pair and others?
There are no obstacles to stop us doing this after the Venom mainnet goes live.
Everscale DeFi Alliance expenses reports – will there be any reports this year?
Definitely. We will continue sharing all the expenses of the Everscale DeFi Alliance with the community. For now, all the expenses are in USDT, but not in EVER, except for market makers and listings, as only these things use EVER liquidity, and everything is locked on the exchanges and fully transparent for EverX and the Everscale DeFi Alliance.
What are the plans to increase the number of developers in the Everscale ecosystem?
One of the obvious things to consider is that developers come to ecosystems that have budgets, and that's why increasing the market cap of EVER is the first area to work on.
A second point is corporate training, and that’s what is currently ongoing in the United Arab Emirates and Korea. Basically, these are new companies starting to build solutions on Everscale. They are not in community chats, but they ask questions in tech chats and on the direct line with Broxus technical support, and if there's not enough assistance, EverX helps with issues.
Will there be guides and instructions on how to launch a local Everscale network?
There is a public repository with a script to launch a simulation of the network within one machine. It's a simple script that can be modified, but it's a basic starting point. If the community has any ideas about what things could be added, we're always ready to extend the functionality – we just need specific feedback from the community.
There are several products in the ecosystem that are self-funded by the community. What about the funding for such products, dev tools, etc?
If there are some tools that ease the workflow of developers, and there is a community who's using them, we're ready to support this. We need feedback from people who are using them, and then we can propose them on EVER DAO and discuss the proposals. There is an audience, and we're ready to support it.
Technical updates, featuring Vyacheslav Belenko, lead of Everscale node development
About one month ago, we had an Everscale strategic meeting between EverX and Broxus to decide what the main tasks and priorities were. We identified the task to reduce time-to-finality, because it's a very important parameter from the point of view of network usage.
Time-to-finality is a critical parameter for any user. It's a high priority task, and at the strategy meeting we decided to decrease it as soon as possible. Regarding the other features on the roadmap, their priority got lower obviously, but that doesn't mean we won't be delivering them.
The SMFT protocol is the consensus that is going to replace the current one – BFT. We need to reduce the time for reaching consensus between validators. Ideally, it should be reduced to less than seconds, compared to a few seconds at the current time. SMFT is currently being tested – the testing started at approximately the end of February. There is an internal network for that, and we're doing tough experiments to check stability and battle test the consensus.
However, time-to-finality and consensus are different tasks, and that's what we are doing right now. It's a preliminary stage for the consensus to be working properly, so we will be shipping it anyway.
Roadmap status: REMP
REMP is a protocol, or family of protocols, that delivers users' messages with a higher guarantee and builds a sequence of these messages to make sure each one is executed and doesn't get lost. REMP is important for users and business applications. At the current time, it is at the stage of final testing.
We started testing REMP at the beginning of the year. It has been deployed in the Devnet for a couple of months, and developers are welcome to try it out.
Roadmap status: Drivechain
This is a solution that will make it possible to store a lot of data, not all of it directly on-chain, but mostly relying on the blockchain’s technology. It's currently been solved at prototype level, but we have higher priorities on other tasks and have postponed Drivechains to a later point in time.
Roadmap status: Workchains
To improve the overall capacity and performance of multiple Workchains, we've been researching a new scheme this year that changes the way messages are exchanged between Workchains. It's not public, but we will share it in the near future. It's not included in mainnet of course, as it's a prototype for now.
Roadmap status: EVM Workchain
The EVM Wworkchain is not a high priority task at the moment and it has been paused currently.
Roadmap status: Optimistic finality
We've made a breakthrough on this feature: we reached experimental proof that our expected numbers are reachable, so now it's a question of how stable and secure it is for the network. It's a technical task requiring time for testing it out.
Ecosystem product updates
FlatQube: Current status
The first upcoming update to FlatQube is limit orders, and it's currently live in beta. The next feature we're testing is liquidity being on different shards, which will make FlatQube super fast, especially with the new time-to-finality.
Octus Bridge: Current status, BRIDGE staking
The BRIDGE DeFi token model hasn’t proven itself, as interest rates are now quite low and it doesn't cover the risks. A new staking model is being researched, and it will be possible to consider several options for sustainable staking after deployment on the Venom mainnet.
Everlend: Current status
This project turned out to be much more complex than planned, and it has been actively developed. Everlend is a part of the Blockchain Family company and the project is getting ready for launch in the near future.
