What makes Celer different? Please read our 2018 Annual Report — Part I Technology Innovation.
Hi everyone,
As the new year approaches, Celer Network team wishes everyone a wonderful new year! Thank you all for your continued support. Since we first came out of stealth in Q1 2018 with some early supporters, we have seen significant growth in Celer Network’s vision, technology, team and community. We would like to share our 2018 highlights with all of you! Our Annual Report 2018 is composed of four parts:
- Part I: Technology Innovation
- Part II: Product Market Fit and User Adoption
- Part III: Developer Adoption & Ecosystem Building
- Part IV: Reflection & Short-term Future Outlook
In the next four days, we will release each part separately. 🙌
About Celer Network:
Celer Network aims to bring Blockchain technology to mass adoption. It is an Internet-scale, trust-free, and privacy-preserving off-chain scaling platform where everyone can quickly build, operate, and use highly scalable decentralized applications. It provides unprecedented performance and flexibility through innovations in off-chain scaling techniques and a crypto economics model designed based on game theory principles to bring essential value to the off-chain ecosystem.
Celer Network is founded by PhDs from MIT, Princeton, UC Berkeley and UIUC and has an all-star engineering team with years of industry experiences from top startups or tech giants like Google, Amazon, Cisco, Oracle, HP and more.
Part I: Technology Innovation
Celer Network continues to lead the technology innovation in the space of off-chain (or “layer-2”) infrastructure with many the world’s first: we led the cutting-edge research and development of layer-2 scaling; we delivered the world’s most advanced off-chain scaling Testnet; we released cWallet: the first-ever mobile wallet supporting Celer Network; we released first-ever mobile native off-chain SDK; we delivered on our promise of being “blockchain agnostic” by supporting two architecturally very different blockchains, Ethereum and DFINITY, at the same time.
On the research front, we were the first to propose a complete technology and crypto economics architecture for the layer-2 scaling space. We were the first to publish a full spec of off-chain smart contract design and a three-layered off-chain technology architecture. We also introduce the first-ever layer-2 crypto economics design with the CELR token driving State Guardian Network, Proof of Liquidity Commitment and Liquidity Backing Auction (CESC talk). These mechanisms together solve the fundamental challenges of state availability, data connectivity and liquidity shortage. Our crypto economics model is now widely recognized by the entire community with our submission accepted by high-profile academic and developer conferences like CESC and Ethereum Devcon 4.
We have also launched Celer Network’s first production-grade Testnet with code name Centauri (as the closest star system to earth). Centauri is the world’s first off-chain scaling Testnet with multi-hop generalized state channel network support. There is no other system running in the world where end users can be seamlessly connected together by a generalized state channel network and run general purpose off-chain smart contracts. Centauri is currently running on top of Ethereum’s Ropsten Testnet with both ETH and ERC-20 support. Not only being the first, Centauri’s transaction performance gain is a stunning 20,000X improvement: a transaction on Celer takes only about 25ms to 100% finality while an Ethereum layer-1 transaction usually takes more than 450s (30 confirmations) to be considered final on major exchanges. This level of latency reduction will directly translate to entirely revolutionized blockchain user experience. As for TPS, Celer Network keeps a horizontal scaling paradigm and therefore can increase TPS simply by adding more nodes.
Along with the Testnet, we released Celer Network SDK on three platforms: Android, iOS and a Go client. With these SDKs, developers can build a long list of off-chain dApps including pay-per-use micro-services with SLA guarantee, instant machine to machine IoT payment and services, prediction market and decentralized assets exchanges with instant off-chain order matching, non-custodian hybrid exchanges, highly interactive blockchain games (such as Blackjack, Monopoly, Chess and Texas Hold’em), online micro auctions, micro insurance and many more. We would like to highlight that we are the world’s first to deliver a mobile native off-chain transaction SDK as we believe mobile platforms will be a prevailing platform for blockchain application adoption. You can access our SDK for Android here and for iOS here.
Leveraging the Celer Network SDK, we have built and released alpha version of cWallet, the first-ever mobile wallet built with Celer Network support. Blockchain applications are in desperate need of good UX and many of the UX challenges are deeply rooted in the lack of scalability today. We have a focus on end user access to Celer platform from day 1.With cWallet, we confidently show that Celer Network Testnet is not an “obscure black console” or some exciting numbers on a website. Instead, Celer Network is something every user can touch and try today with instant off-chain payment and highly interactive fun games. See a video demo of cPay and cGomoku. We have received overwhelmingly positive feedbacks from the community. cWallet serves as not only an entry point to Celer Network, but also a reference design for our future crypto wallet partners to quickly provide a pattern for our partners to integrate with Celer Network. Finally, we have used cWallet to collect important feedbacks from users in terms of onboarding Celer Network platform and that has helped us to design a better user experience to onboard new users to the crypto world.
Celer Network set out to a general layer-2 platform that brings Internet scale to every blockchain. We are delivering our promise by supporting multiple blockchains with drastically different architectures. We currently support all EVM-compatible blockchains, such as Ethereum, Thunder Token and Oasis Labs, and also support an entirely different programming paradigms proposed by DFINITY. However, with our cChannel abstraction, users and developers interacting with upper layer APIs won’t notice the differences in the underlying blockchains, and can focus on just building and using better apps. This layered abstraction brings a new level of interoperability that makes Celer Network a potential “narrow waist” in the broader blockchain ecosystem like TCP/IP is for the Internet architecture. Checkout our smart contract open source repo here.
Part II Preview: Product Market Fit and User Adoption
We have always believed that user adoption is paramount for blockchain’s progression and is the only way to progress to the next phase of blockchain industry. To this end, we released our user-facing app cWallet alpha on Android and iOS platform. cWallet allows users to access to cApps: cPay, a simple payment app with instant transaction and no fee; cGomoku, a board game where you can bet some testnet ETH with your friends on the outcome of the game, in an entirely trust-free way.
Also, come and celebrate holidays with Celer Network by participating our cGomoku Pop-up Challenge and win ETH. Thank you for reading! We’ll see you tomorrow for our Part II update: Product Market Fit and User Adoption. Happy New Year!! 🙌
Follow us at:
- Download here: https://get.celer.app
- Website: https://www.celer.network/
- Telegram: https://t.me/celernetwork
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/CelerNetwork
- Github: https://github.com/celer-network
- Discord: https://discord.gg/Trhab5w
- Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/Celer-Network-Meetup/
- Medium: https://medium.com/celer-network
