Design Of Basechain (Draft)

Basechain is a project which aims at building blockchain and distributed system easily and rapidily. This repository contains documents describing the design and high-level overview of Basechain.

Basechain provides three tools:

Basechain Network: Basechain Network is a blockchain and network. And you can deploy a smart contract or a chain contract here. A chain contract is a model file which contains how a new blockchain works. Anyone want to run it could start service and be rewarded according to the the chain contract.
Base Framework: Base is a framework which helps you build blockchain. It parameterize and modularize the architecture of blockhain.
Gap Test Suite: Gap is a test enviroment for you to quickly verify your idea on distributed system. And it could help simulate processing data of your distributed system to tell you how your nodes changes.

Guides (draft)

In the final goal, you can build and deploy your blockchain like the followings:

block(blk) is a tools of baseframework like node and bpm is blk package manager:

bpm init

And you will fill into basic information

chainName
version
description
author

Then It will create four folders in you project root directory.

.
├── chain.json
├── application
├── consensus
├── negotiate
└── node
└── environment
└── main.bc

You can config your code and function in the different layers which are different directories.

Node Layer

In the node directory, The main goal is to provide:

Channel: Channel is an abstraction for establish a connection between two nodes, It has the followings:
- Method: send
- Event: data
- Event: connected
- Event: disconnected
Message: Message is an abstraction of data. It contains:
- headers
- content
- channel infomation

You can get some terms of P2P network such as:

DHT: neighborhood discovery
STUN: Traversal of UDP over NATs

And you may know the Channel is based on the neighborhood discovery techiniques and Messages if based on some transport techniques.

If you need a WebRTC to implement your P2P network, you could just:

cd node
bpm node get webrtc

And bpm will download the package and you blockchain could just run on the web browser and It will be very interesting.

Negotiate Layer

The negotiate layer is very import for censensus programming. You at least provide a avaialble network for consensus layer to program. A network is something like actor programming model. You could get a simple view:

POW: the actor are all the same and the message can be only transaction and block
PoS: the actor may be devided into two actors:
- bonded validators actor
- normal actor
DPoS: It can be devided into:
- super node
- normal node

And for some BFT consensus.

The negotiate simplify the operations you need to do for you consensus programming. And there are some other funcions:

random negoitating, for some special consensus and application support such DEFINITY
data exchange negotiating, It provides data exchange betwwen different chains

Consensus Layer

Base Framework will provide a domain specific language to help you build your consensus. The core of

DSL is program it like a god

If you have a global view of actors, you could program it in a god's view and compiler will help you how every actor should handle it. For example for PoW:

The longest and hardist chain is the confirmed chain

Then you just explain what is longest and what is hardist.

Applicaion Layer