Understand Gear Protocol and _a Network in one article

Author: Nicholas Garcia, Messari Research Analyst; Translation: Golden Finance 0xjs

The main points:

Gear Protocol is a universal cloud infrastructure and smart contract platform based on Substrate. Gear’s features are tailored for asynchronous programming and parallel execution, including actor models, persistent memory, and the WebAssembly execution environment.

a Network is the first L1 public chain developed using the Gear protocol. It seamlessly integrates a series of functions of the Gear protocol.

After two years of development, a Network Mainnet has launched with more than 40 applications and integrations with more than 30 ecosystem partners.

Background introduction

Gear Protocol was launched in September 2021 by core developers involved in founding Polkadot and Substrate.

Co-founder and CEO Nikolay Volf has been involved with Polkadot and Substrate since 2015 and pioneered the first WebAssembly smart contracts at Parity Technologies. Co-founder and Chief Financial Officer Ilya Veller has more than 20 years of experience in the financial field and has worked at companies such as Renaissance Capital, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. Co-founder and head of development Aleksandr Bugorkov has technical experience working at companies like Lyft, New Relic, and Spotify. Chief Technology Officer Petr Volynskiy has expertise in product development and technical leadership.

In December 2021, Gear Protocol closed a $12 million venture round led by Blockchain Ventures, with participation from Three Arrows Capital, Lemniscap, Distributed Global, and individuals from Web3 Foundation and Parity Technologies.

In the year since the launch of the Gear protocol, core developers have been actively integrating it into the Polkadot ecosystem. They have connections with various wallets, data platforms and governance platforms. In February 2023, a Network was officially launched as the L1 network of Gear Protocol. In September 2023, its PoS mainnet was launched.

As of the time of this report, both Gear Protocol and a Network have transitioned to a community-led development model and are on the path to continued decentralization.

Gear Protocol

Overview

Gear Protocol is a Substrate-based smart contract platform that uses WebAssembly (Wasm) programs. This enables it to compile contracts from different programming languages such as Rust, C and C++. The protocol’s API can be deployed across multiple networks without modifying contracts. Gear’s unique features are tailored for asynchronous programming, including actor models, persistent memory, and the WebAssembly execution environment.

Substrate

Substrate is a modular blockchain development framework known for its role in underpinning the Polkadot network. Substrate facilitates the integration of multiple specialized blockchains, thereby enhancing scalability. Substrate’s main features include:

Forkless updates, built-in coordination, cross-language support via WebAssembly, light client adaptability, guaranteed end results, easy integration.

With Substrate, Gear Protocol accelerates the development process, highlights its core components, and takes full advantage of Rust’s security and efficiency. This simplifies the developer experience, allowing them to focus on the business logic of a specific project without having to build a complete blockchain infrastructure. Additionally, it simplifies the integration of projects developed under the Gear protocol with the Polkadot and Kusama networks.

Actor model

The Gear protocol utilizes the actor model to optimize asynchronous messaging and parallel processing, ensuring cross-chain compatibility and faster speeds. In contrast to systems that rely on shared memory communication, the actor model emphasizes message passing. In this structure, actors (whether smart contracts or users) maintain their own state and interact entirely through message passing. Gear Protocol further refines this process by implementing mechanisms that maintain sequential messaging.

Actors can modify their own state, start new entities or participate without sharing memory. Gear Protocol leverages Rust’s async-await for asynchronous programming and seamlessly integrates the actor model into its smart contract framework. This approach uses async/await syntax directly, minimizes errors, and provides synchronous and asynchronous messaging options.

WebAssembly (WASM)

WebAssembly (Wasm) is a binary instruction format designed to be used as a portable compilation target for high-level programming languages. It allows code written in languages such as C, C++, and Rust to execute at near-native speeds in web browsers and other environments. Wasm is designed to be secure, efficient, and platform-agnostic, making it suitable for a variety of applications, including web apps, games, and more. In the Gear protocol, the integration of Wasm ensures speed and efficiency, as smart contracts are compiled directly into machine code, ensuring optimal performance and reducing transaction fees.

The advantages of WebAssembly include: speed and cross-platform compatibility; readable format, reducing manual code intervention; safe execution in a sandbox environment, consistent with typical network security protocols; language diversity, because Gear Protocol supports Rust and has the potential to C#/C++, Go and Java will be supported in the future.

Persistent Memory

The Gear protocol uses persistent memory that reflects real-world hardware characteristics, simplifying the development process. By choosing persistent memory over traditional storage, Gear preserves full program state and facilitates the use of complex language constructs. With enhanced memory virtualization, the Gear directly manages memory allocation.

Within the Gear framework, parallel message processing is aligned with the CPU core to ensure efficient task processing. Messages are classified according to the program to which they are assigned, allowing multiple messages to refer to a program within a single processing cycle. Once processed, the information is re-queued for subsequent cycles.

Outstanding capabilities

The Gear Protocol platform’s custom runtime is driven by the actor model and persistent memory technology, providing the following technical capabilities:

● Decentralized Execution: Unlike most platforms that require external triggers to trigger smart contracts, Gear’s asynchronous messaging enables contracts to send delayed messages. This will promote richer applications, true decentralization and higher user value.

● Message sending automation: All Gear messages consume gas. With the gas reservation system, if the program has insufficient gas, it can use the reserved gas. It is worth noting that contracts can schedule messages for future operations, similar to traditional cron jobs, ensuring multiple autonomous on-chain operations as long as gas is available.

● No payment transactions: Gear introduces vouchers to provide users with a superior experience. Vouchers are issued by network entities and users can send information to specific programs without paying gas fees. This mirrors traditional web services, increases user engagement, simplifies application adoption, and makes the decentralized space more inclusive and user-friendly.

In fields such as DeFi, games, social networking, and applications, use cases for complex program logic or microservice architecture are even more complex, including on-chain automation, delayed messages, stop-loss mechanisms, dollar cost averaging strategies, automatic compounding functions, and limit order functions. and subscription services.

a Network

Overview

a Network is the first L1 platform developed using the Gear protocol. It seamlessly integrates a series of features of the Gear protocol, including actor model, persistent memory, WASM, etc. a is built based on the Substrate framework to ensure fork-free runtime upgrades. Additionally, it boasts features such as reduced transaction fees, staking, active governance, and an ambassador program.

In contrast to most L1 platforms (including newer L1s such as Sui, which focuses on sharding but lacks parallel execution, and Aptos, which provides parallel execution but ignores sharding), A is designed to support both sharding and parallel execution. Additionally, a optimizes the developer experience through precise data specification.

a token

A is the native token of a Network, with a total supply of 10 billion. The allocation is as follows:

Founders/Team/Advisors: 20%, locked in for one year, then 36 months linear vesting.

Investors: 21.5%, locked in for 12 months, then vests linearly over 12 months.

Foundation: 23% for education, public relations, events, foundation and ecosystem development businesses. This also includes market-making activities and liquidity management.

Community: 35.5% to support developer and validator grants, airdrop programs, and to offset inflation in the total token supply.

Every network operation uses A, including transaction fees, staking, and governance mechanisms. Community members are exploring a model for rewarding app developers, similar to existing systems such as Astar, Archway and Evmos. If this developer reward model is adopted, tokens will be automatically allocated as part of the block reward.

A’s annual inflation rate is 6%. To mitigate the effects of inflation, 10% of the total token supply will be allocated to the inflation offset pool. Approximately one-third of the block rewards (guaranteed by the foundation) will be channeled into the pool to replenish the pool’s funds. Tokens from the pool are then sent to the designated burn address. Through community governance, there is the option to reallocate funds from this pool to developer grants or to divide a portion of the block reward into the protocol treasury to encourage future development. Additionally, community votes can be used to adjust the annual inflation rate downwards.

Pledge

a implements the NPos (Nominated Proof-of-Stake) consensus model. This approach is also used by Polkadot, which differs from the DPoS consensus in that nominators who stake A face the risk of penalties.

A validator completes a payable action, known as era points, every 12 hours. Every 12 hours, a subset of validators will be randomly assigned for verification, and the era points obtained will be multiplied by a multiple. The combination of era points and random verification probabilistically ensures that verifiers receive almost the same rewards. Since validators receive nearly identical rewards and distribute those rewards proportionally to nominators, nominators have an incentive to stake with lower validators in order to receive higher rewards. The validator-nominator reward model is designed to decentralize the validators of the A network.

Governance

a utilizes the OpenGov framework as its native governance model. Polkadot also uses the OpenGov framework, allowing any A holder to participate in the governance of a.

OpenGov enables every decision within a network to come from a referendum proposed by the community. Multiple referendums can be held simultaneously, speeding up the approval of bills. Proposals are divided into tiers with specific conditions, such as designated voting times, a cap on each qualifying vote, and the required A deposit. As the levels increase, the conditions for passing proposals become more stringent.

OpenGov also has a governing body called “Fellowship”. The Fellowship mainly performs three responsibilities: serving as a technical consultant, maintaining and developing core protocols and codes, and promoting A’s technology. Fellowship functions similarly to a developer DAO, allowing all users to join, reducing centralization issues. Decentralization is ensured by a hierarchy with multiple mechanisms, including a constitution, community voting for senior positions, and checks and balances to limit leadership control. While Fellowship cannot pass a referendum, it can be whitelisted, making it easier and faster to pass.

The model also introduces flexibility in delegation, allowing users to delegate their voting rights based on belief and the number of tokens committed. The new delegation feature is designed to ensure the required turnout for proposals while protecting voter anonymity and maintaining a censorship-free design.

Competitive Analysis

Gear Protocol and a Network are entering a highly competitive blockchain environment. They will compete with L1 networks such as Cosmos Interchain, Avalanche Subnets, Ethereum Rollups and Polkadot Parachains.

These networks all emphasize unique trade-offs. Cosmos Interchain leans heavily towards sovereignty. In contrast, the Ethereum and Polkadot ecosystems place more emphasis on shared security.

A considerable number of users are rooted in the EVM chain. To stand out, you must provide developers with a better development experience. Additionally, they will need to attract and retain users, most likely by launching a breakthrough app or feature.

Progress and the road ahead

Since its launch in late 2021, the core team has been proactive in integrating Gear Protocol and a Network into the Substrate ecosystem. They have built integrations with top ecosystem wallets such as Talisman, SubWallet, and Nova Wallet. In addition, they have established partnerships with well-known parachains and Substrate ecosystem companies, including Crust Network, Automata Network, Polkassembly, and Subscan.

a network launched its test network in 2023, and as of the time of this report, more than 20,000 people have participated. These people are involved in activities such as NFT minting, gaming, and staking.

The mainnet of the a network was also recently unveiled. As they progress, the Foundation’s goal is to support the community in enhancing the core technology, expanding functionality, and attracting a broader user base.

in conclusion

Gear Protocol is a Substrate-based cloud infrastructure and smart contract platform designed for asynchronous programming and parallel execution, providing functions such as actor model, persistent memory, and WebAssembly execution. a Network is the first L1 platform built on Gear Protocol and seamlessly integrates Gear Protocol’s feature set. After two years of development, the a Network mainnet launched on September 20 with more than 40 applications and partnerships with more than 30 ecosystem collaborators.

Gear Protocol and a Network are entering a highly competitive blockchain environment. Their success depends on leveraging the core capabilities of the network to deliver unparalleled experiences for users and developers.