ThunderCore: Breakthrough Scaling for Ethereum Dapps

Today as part of the Nutshell series, I want to take a look at ThunderCore. So ThunderCore is one of those breakthroughs in scaling technologies that brings up high transactions per second. Now we all heard about a lot of scaling breakthroughs and technologies before, but what sets ThunderCore apart is that it scales not only transactions, but it also scales smart contracts. It allows for sub-under-one-second confirmations. So I guess that's part of the main pull and what drove me to this project. I also spent quite a long time the past week reading about it and spent the past few days programming and just testing on that. And we'll show you exactly what can be done on the main ThunderCore mainnet. And if you guys are new to the Nutshell series, the Nutshell series is where I give you an executive summary of what a piece of technology is. And I have a video playlist for all the nutshell summaries up here. Now in today's video, what we're going to look at is why we're going to just look at the theoretical reasons behind why scaling is so hard. And we're going to look at how ThunderCore solves this. What was their novel breakthrough technique? And we're going to look even deeper, just actually going down and testing and using it. Because I think that's probably the most important part. We've heard so many things about, you know, all these scaling breakthroughs, but we can't use them. And the best part about ThunderCore is that it's live right now and I can use it in its mainnet state. And making this video was really fun. I got to go back to programming and learning a lot about how this programming structure works. And also I learned a lot about the fundamentals of blockchain too. Just reading all these academically published papers was much better than reading a lot of these flimsy marketing schemes. Let's start off with some basics. Why are blockchains so slow? You've probably heard of the blockchain trilemma where Vitalik famously said blockchain systems can only have at most two of the following three properties, which is scalability, decentralization, and security. So you can only have two, not the third. So let's cut to the chase. If there is a problem called the blockchain trilemma, then how the hell does ThunderCore solve this? Well, it does it via two paths, actually. So when you send a transaction, normally it will go through something called the optimistic fast path. But there's always a backup, a backup called the slow path, which serves as the backbone of this blockchain. And you can kind of view it as a super fast highway. It handles a lot of transactions per second. It's super fast. Zoom, zoom, zoom. Transactions go left, right, and center. But if something happens to that highway, that fast path, you can always resort to the slower kind of grid of neighborhood roads. It's more proven. It's more reliable. And it's more secure, but not really fast. And what's cool is that ThunderCore chose to use Ethereum as the fallback slow chain. So if anything does happen on its freeway and its super express path, it falls back to Ethereum. And then it resolves issues and has the same security and decentralization as Ethereum. If you look at the fast path in detail, there are two components. One component is called the accelerator. The accelerator is the one responsible for proposing and ordering transactions. And then there's a committee of consensus nodes that approves them. And if you think of an analogy, it's kind of like a sports team leader. The team leader will say, hey, go to that direction. And then the team players will be like, yes or no. And so long as two thirds of the players say, aye, then boom, that direction is set and locked in. And it's only done in one round of voting. And that's exactly what makes ThunderCore transactions so fast and allows for high throughput. It's because you can propose very quickly and resolve that, accept it or deny it in a single round of voting. There's no back and forth that can slow down the process. So the interesting thing and the first question that will probably spring to mind is, is it centralized? How much centralization is there? Because there's one accelerator and there's a committee. But how much power does that accelerator have and how much centralization is there? And I think that's the trickery of all this. The trickery here is that there are ways to refer back to the slow chain, the Ethereum blockchain, to make and check up on what's happening on the accelerator and prove if the accelerator is functioning or non-functioning. One of the interesting bits of research that they did is that they mathematically proved that so long as there is one honest node on the network, they can find a point where they can disprove a majority of dishonest nodes. And this is why you can trust the optimistic fast path is because it's very resilient to anyone trying to overrule the network. And the moment some dishonest behavior is detected, there are mathematical proofs that can exit out of the fast path and kind of change, reelect a new system. So now onto the fun stuff. So I've been talking about the theory a lot, but actually because the mainnet deployed, I actually got to manage to play around with it and test how a smart contract could be deployed. So the kind of interesting thing here is that because ThunderCore is compatible with EVM, it's essentially just like Ethereum. And you can use a lot of the Ethereum tools that you're familiar with on ThunderCore. So if you like MetaMask on your browser, you can actually connect up your MetaMask to the ThunderCore mainnet. And the instructions are pretty simple. You basically copy down this RCP URL over here, and I'll just send you a link down below. But it's basically pasted into the custom RCP section. So you paste that here, chain ID 108, symbol is TT. Save that. So once that's saved, you can actually see that on my account, we actually do have a little bit of TT. This is the free TT that you get to use to test out smart contracts. And it's all on the mainnet, and you can try it out for yourself as well. TT, I would like to say the Thunder token, it's not like an Ethereum token. It's not living on Ethereum. Thunder token is on its own mainnet, and it's pretty much used exactly the same way as Ethereum, which is to use to pay for gas for Thunder token smart contracts and transactions. Now, in terms of what I did, I pretty much used a ERC-20 contract. So these are Ethereum-based programs and contracts, but I can exactly use them one for one on Thunder token, which is kind of cool. So I played around with that. I won't go through the whole thing in this nutshell video, but I will make a future video about how to deploy your own tutorial and how to make your own token. What I will show you is the smart contract deployment process. So I'm using Remix, which is a tool used for Ethereum. You can use it directly on Thunder Core. And we're going to just deploy the smart token here, make my own contract, make my own ERC-20 that lives on Thunder Core. Decimal two places and transact. So this is like launching your own token, guys. This is like, it blows my mind how easy it was. It's just all the programming stuff, it looks hard, but it took like two or three hours to figure out. It was pretty much nothing. So you have a gas fee here for the Thunder Core mainnet. It takes a little bit of TT. I'm going to confirm. And then, boom, contract deployed. And that's how fast it takes. And this is exactly how fast it would take for transactions as well. So if you want to do any interaction on Thunder Core, it pretty much just takes under a second. And even if I want to interact with that contract, like print some tokens and give it to myself, just pretty much 888 tokens, transact. And it's done. Pretty darn fast. So there were some questions, of course. The first one I asked myself was, is this basically like a faster version of Ethereum? The team actually wrote about this as well, saying that it's not just a fast version, low cost version of Ethereum, but they're adding a few other features too. One of the features being a DApp developer funded gas cost. So right now, say if you're interacting with a DApp on Ethereum, you got to hold some Ethereum yourself to pay for the gas costs. And say, for example, you're playing CryptoKitties and you want to breed a kitty, you got to hold some Ethereum. You got to pay those fees. But here, what they're trying to build is on a roadmap, they're building a feature where the DApp developer, like CryptoKitties, the company pays for it. So in fact, the user, they can use it as any normal application without having a bunch of fuel, Ethereum nearby to fuel that transaction. So in terms of the current development, I did say that the mainnet is launched, but there is one caveat to this mainnet, which is that it is a pre-release, pre-launched mainnet, which means that it's not fully feature complete. And one of the main factors that's missing is a public staking system. So I said that there's a committee of consensus nodes and these need to be staked. Well, this is not fully built yet. So that's what's not available right now. So that staking element is not there. But what is possible is that all these transactions that's already happening and all the contracts that are being deployed on the pre-release mainnet, this will be live. So anything done now is, well, it's real. It's solid. And one of the main reasons why they're doing this pre-release mainnet and making sure that this is the same as the actual mainnet is that they can court developers and get these developers coming over right now, as opposed to later when every full feature, all the full features are deployed. So right now they actually tested this and said, hey, you know what? They tested the smart contracts for Augur, Banker, CryptoKitty, ZeroX Project. They brought that over to the mainnet for ThunderCore and it works. So that's kind of interesting. They're really trying to target Ethereum developers to migrate over to ThunderCore. And that, guys, is my nutshell summary of ThunderCore. Now, if you guys want to learn a little bit more about ThunderCore, the best paper and best resource is the Thunderella Protocol white paper. I'll put a link down on the bottom. And that describes in a lot of detail and has the equations for how this fast path works and how to exit it if something goes wrong. I'm also building a lot more videos for the nutshell series. It's been really fun for me recently. So if you have any recommendations for what projects to look at or what kind of tokens to cover, leave a comment in the comment section below and I'll try to look at them and do a series for as well. Guys, thank you guys so much for watching this episode. What do you guys think about ThunderToken and have you guys tried it out? Leave a comment about what you think in the comment section below as well. Thank you guys so much for watching this video. See you guys next time.