OpenST Blockchain Protocol Mosaic Says It Has Ethereum Scaling Solution That Works Now

Mosaic: An Ethereum Scaling Solution That Works Now?

According to Afir Schoedon, the release manager of the Ethereum software client provider Parity Technologies, Ethereum is now running at full capacity. He recently warned users to “stop deploying dapps” on the Ethereum blockchain as the capacity was simply overwhelmed.

Obviously, this announcement has caused some uproar in the community as a lot of people attacked Ethereum for being so full so soon. Vitalik Buterin stepped up to defend the protocol, but it was not enough to make people calmer.

Scaling Solutions And Mosaic

The whole controversy makes it clear: there is an urgent need for a scaling solution that can be used in the Ethereum network and that is able to do it soon. While there are plenty of layer-one and layer-two solutions that are being prepared, it is quite obvious that the community is urging for a solution now.

According to OpenST, a blockchain company, the solution exists and its name is Mosaic. Jason Goldberg, the CEO of the company, defends that Mosaic can be used right now to offer a great scaling solution for the Ethereum network. He highlights that the technology requires no fundamental changes in how Ethereum works, so it will be easy to deploy.

The CEO believes that the team at OpenST will have the preliminary version of the Mosaic solution ready in just three months (which pretty much attests that the solution that is “ready now” is not really so ready at the time).

Once the software has been fully tested, Mosaic will be able to be used on Ethereum to advance other solutions like sharding and zk-snarks, which requires some changes in the network to really work properly. The main advantage of Mosaic is that, when it is finally ready, it will be able to be used instantaneously.

This new protocol has been created in a partnership between ex-employees of Hyperledger, including Benjamin Bollen, and its main goal is to allow tokens to be moved into an auxiliary system to make the bulk of the computational activity outside of the network. Described as a “gateway protocol”, Mosaic is one of the best bets that you can make right now.

Mosaic will be also used to assist developers to build token-based economies on the Etherum blockchain and to create scaling solutions that will immediately boost the efficiency of Ethereum.

According to the CEO, the team felt that it was important to show to the mainstream media that they could move their transactions into auxiliary chains and that this could help into other scaling solutions like sharding.

The protocol was created to achieve two main goals: to increase the capacity of the network and to reduce transactions costs so that the users would be able to spend smaller amounts of gas.

How Was Mosaic Created?

Mosaic was built upon the work of Vitalik Buterin and Virgil Griffith, another Ethereum researcher. The work of the two on the Casper FFG, a software that was created to provide consensus as proof of stake and sharing as layer one solutions. These ideas led the lead architect of Mosaic, Bollen, to understand that securing off-chain auxiliary systems without sacrificing the transactions was possible.

Bollen described the technology as an eye-opener and decided to increase the capacity of the network by creating Mosaic as an “opt-in system”. This way, devs would be able to compute the power necessary to make dapps work outside of the chain. The process called “token sharding”, was built on top of an early Casper proposal in which you can finalize smart contracts without full node replication.

However, unlike Casper, the idea is that Mosaic would require the devs to choose the most cost-effective shards to execute the tokens on them and would also implement a proof of stake incentive structure in which token transaction validators could cast votes instead of solving computational puzzles. It will also have mechanisms to punish dishonest voters.

The main selling point of Mosaic, as we have already stated, is that there is already the technology to use it in the short-term if the tests yield results and the company is actually able to release the software in the next three months.

How Will Mosaic Work?

Two major components are very important for Mosaic to work as intended. The first one is a public validation pool that can be used to secure token transactions on the auxiliary system and that will commit back to the mainnet at regular intervals. To do it, the validators will have to observe the tokens staked on the network and the corresponding outcomes of token transfers.

They will be able to do it via the gateway protocol created by the company, which will absorb the “state root” of the two systems. By doing it, they will create metablocks that can be verified by a pool of validators via a two-thirds majority vote system.

As the metablocks are confirmed, the validators will take the last finalized state of the meta-blockchain and give the results back to the original mainnet. This way, even with the limitations of the Ethereum network, Mosaic’s process will help things to run considerably faster.

The second main component of the Mosaic infrastructure is that the whole system will be secured with the core Ethereum technology and will have a backup plan in case the validators are unable to get to the two-thirds majority, as the Ethereum mainnet will be consulted when this happens.

This way, is an auxiliary chain does not reach consensus, there is still the main Ethereum network with its proof of work system that can be used to solve the issue. There is also a safety rail that prevents validators from unstaking tokens until 2020 as a way to protect the network.

We still have to see whether this technology will actually be as successful as it claims, though, because launching will be only the first step towards improving it and making it a better scaling solution. We all remember the rocky launch of the Bitcoin Lightning Network and how much has to be put into making everything work as intended in the reality, as it is often harder than to do it in the paper.

As Ethereum is in a dire need of scaling solutions, we can only hope that Mosaic will be the answer for the network to have a proper scaling solution in 2019.