The Third Web #15 - Edgeware & Parity, Infrastructure on Top of Infrastructure

What is Edgeware

Edgeware being developed by an entity called Commonwealth Labs

Built on Parity’s Substrate

Grandpa finality tool

On-chain governance

Scripting built in.

Using Web Assembly (Wasm)

Building on Substrate

People used to build their own web servers, now they use the cloud.

People used to build new chains, now they can use Substrate.

This enables builders to focus on the area of their expertise.

One month after development began a test net was operational

Three months the project was live.

EOS was too centralised

Ethereum was not flexible enough

WebAssembly

Being able to use Rust or C++ is great

Still being experimented with

The Polkadot and Substrate ecosystem

Friendly and helpful community

20 projects underway

100 planned for the end of the year

Platform still stabilizing

People are building now planning to switch to the security of the Polkadot chain.

Securing the edgeware chain

Delegated PoS aiming to move to Nominated PoS as Sybil resistance mechanism

Grandpa for finality

Round Robin leader selection

The ultimate goal is to rely on the security of Polkadot

The problem of governance

It’s a problem that has been pursued by humanity for all time

Blockchains increase social scalability

Improves legibility

Enables new organisations

These new organisations need new governance systems

Blockchains are new so there is naturally experimentation and opportunity.

Want to further this human endeavour in the blockchain world

How does edgeware actually do governance?

Allocate tokens using a “Lock Drop” of ether.

One token one vote.

Vote can be allocated

Focusing on core changes to the network/protocol, allocation of on-chain treasury that is bootstrapped by the block reward.

The Lock Drop

Initial token distribution is the linchpin of effective network governance

Require the belief in the economic value of the token

Previous ways of doing this were an ICO or airdropping a token

The Livepeer Merkle Mine was an interesting experiment

Edgeware hopes to get the same effect of distributing tokens to people who want to actively participate without the bloat of a Merkle Mine.

Ether tokens are locked in a contract that prevents the tokens from moving for a period of 3, 6, or 12 months. The registry of locked tokens is used to initiate the Edgeware chain with additional tokens allocated to individuals who locked their tokens up for longer periods.

Infrastructure on top of infrastructure

Are we locked in an infrastructure phase?