ProxiMax: Proximity to Resources & Tools for Maximum (D)application Development Benefits

in #blockchain4 years ago (edited)
Proximity to resources, labor and market have always been some key factors considered when positioning or siting a business. The farther away from these requirements, the more difficult it is to manage the business, especially in cost.

On a virtual level, this happens to be true as well. Developing apps or Dapps is more arduous for the developer when the required tools needed for successful development and deployment are not within range. This costs the developer and the business in general as deployment is delayed and most often market readiness for the product lost - not to mention how much it will cost developers to search for a new tool, learn the new tool and be able to utilize the new tool and all the costly mistakes that come with doing something new.

To put it into perspective, imagine having an entire city inside a single familiar house. Everything you need and will ever need is within a walkable distance and you know quite well how to navigate your way to what you need and how to use what you need. Of course! you do, the house has been your home since childhood. One could literally say "you're in your elements" when you're home. There will be no transportation cost in getting from one place to another and no cost of learning new technical how to's. As it is the dream of a technician or engineer to have a do-all tool.

The blockosphere, as I'd like to call it, is advancing meteorically by the day as dapps becoming able to do what they could not do before, such as process transactions at a faster rate, transaction automation, etcetera. As such, the tools used in this space need to as well - the endpoint being an all-encompassing tool. Proximax is at the forefront of making this dream a reality.

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What is Proximax?

Proximax is a next-generation blockchain protocol that is geared towards providing a flexible, secure, fast and cost-efficient infrastructure development platform. It is an integrated and Distributed Ledger technology (IaDLT) with built-in plugins such as streaming, storage, and supercontracts which can enable developers to build a wide range of applications. The blockchain protocol is the cement that holds it all up, providing the necessary features for identification, incentivization, message recording, state management, and asset exchange. The blockchain protocol is set up in a standardized manner to have it plugin receptive. This makes Proximax poised to indeed achieve the developer's dream of a do-all tool.

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Proximax Technologies

  • The Sirius Chain

All the core services which happen within the Proximax ecosystem including blockchain services, storage, streaming, supercontracts, and content review are all recorded in the Sirius Chain. The Sirius chain achieves a lot of unconventional feat in the blockchain industry, ranging from being able to handle versatile business-oriented smart contracts to the tokenization of services which is the creation of digital assets to represent physical assets.

To enhance the utility, security, and performance of the network, Proximax introduces service units, another novel concept, which are fundamentally digital token contracts which makes it possible for businesses to be partly digitalized, as they can create a digital token which aligns with their intentions. With the Sirius chain, Proximax can become an ecosystem of services with a solid token economy.

It is interesting to note that, the Sirius chain is an updated copy of a very successful chain in the blockosphere, NEM's Catapult. This network has been seen to be able to handle the burden of extended ecosystems and of other side chains that run on the network.

The Sirius chain has the Proof of Stake (PoS) as its consensus algorithm which utilizes both wealth and age as part of its reputation system to determine who gets to validate transactions or not.

A consensus algorithm is fundamentally the protocol that governs how an agreement is reached on the network and there exist several kinds of algorithms including Proof of Work (PoW), used by bitcoin and decentralized Proof of Stake (dPoS) which is used by STEEM and EOS. Generally PoS and its derivatives are the fastest kinds of consensus algorithms that have a considerable effect on the transaction speed of a network.

The Sirius Chain can be expected to be a network of Speed based on its choice of Consensus algorithm - the PoS. To ensure more fairness in its network, as the common problem of "the rich getting richer" has been previously observed in the PoS consensus algorithms, Proximax curbs this problem by combining with its PoS algorithm, its novel Proof of Greed consensus algorithm. This algorithm makes sure that no node is too greedy in collecting large transaction fees as they accept transactions and generate blocks.


  • The Sirius Storage

Proximax provides a trustless form of storage known as a Distributed File Management System (DFMS). This storage system utilizes encrypted data sharding in safeguarding data. This means that the Sirius storage encrypts data (structured and unstructured binary data), splits it (this is what is known as sharding) and distributes it to peer-to-peer storage devices hosted by different decentralized owners on the network. These persons are not manually hand-picked but are pre-selected by the network's consensus algorithm previously mentioned.

The Sirius Storage is more than simply a storage platform. It is also a repository for supercontracts and the nodes which make up the Sirius Storage also act as executor nodes, as they not only store these blocks of codes but are also equipped with a virtual machine to execute these codes. This set up is no doubt poised to facilitate the code execution and have a collative effect on the network of faster transactions.

Unlike most other available decentralized storage systems, Sirius storage can handle all types of binary data including graphics, video or the popular text content.

There are three major actors in the Sirius storage; the acceptors, replicators and the storage verifiers. Upon the request of a consumer, that is a Dapp, the Acceptor nodes accept the request and then propagate the files to the replicators which then stores the file. the storage verifiers primarily check out for idle replicators or offline replicators and when identified, initiates further replication of the files.

These actors have their token economics which governs them, the rewards fo good behavior and penalties as well as fees they charge. for example, the acceptors charge for bandwidth to transfer data and the replicators charge for storage space. Get more information on High-Level technical WhitePaper.


  • Supercontracts

They are called super for a reason, one particularly obvious one is that they don't operate as traditional smart contracts do. Traditional smart contracts are immutable digital contacts which govern the flow of a digital transaction, logically. its immutability is its weakness, in the sense that the bugs that found in them are not easily squashed or technically speaking, debugged because it is stored in the immutable blockchain.

Even if there are no bugs, one might need to update the codes in them, to make it more lightweight and efficient, but this is also difficult, because of its immutability. This is the major reason why they have been tagged blockchain "bloaters", as they make the blockchain unnecessarily large, thereby making synchronization of new nodes expensive and painstakingly difficult.

Proximax's Supercontracts eliminates these weaknesses of traditional smart contracts. They can be easily modified, stopped and also easily executed. The reason for this is that they are stored on the Sirius storage ( which can hold and execute codes simultaneously) and not on the Sirius chain. Of course, modifications made to the contracts are those agreed upon by the pre-established authorized parties in the consensus algorithm.

By storing the super contracts on the Sirius storage, Proximax brilliantly eliminates the weaknesses of traditional contracts and realizes its goal of building executable codes of digital contacts which can be custom-built for specific business purposes.

Similar to Sirius storage, the Supercontracts nodes have its actors and it also includes the Acceptors and the Replicators as well as some new actors such as Run initiator nodes and the executor. The functions of these actors as well as the tokenomics which guides their behaviors can be found on the High-Level technical WhitePaper.

In line with the Programming dream of flexibility, the supercontracts prove their strength in their versatility of being able to be written in most of the mainstream languages including Java, C++, Python, C#, Js, etcetera. Hence deleting the need for developers to learn a particular language before they can develop and deploy a dapp or an app.

The following is the uploading and modification process of a supercontract;

  1. A new supercontract is uploaded into the Sirius Storage.
  2. A hash is generated that references the supercontract.
  3. Approval of the supercontract by a consensus reached by the pre-established authorized parties via a multi-signature transaction.
  4. Supercontract call by the application developer using an SDK.
  5. The execution of the Supercontract by the announcement trigger.
  6. Execution of Supercontract which triggers transactions pon the Sirius chain. Source: Proximax WhitePaper

  • Sirius Streaming

The most interesting core service, perhaps only to me, which Proximax provides is the Sirius streaming. It comes in two forms; storage streaming and live streaming. Storage streaming uses the Sirius storage as an entry-point of action, that is, the video content is pre-recorded on the Sirius storage and streamed to different viewers. Live streaming on the hand, is recorded live and transmitted immediately to viewers.

While for storage streaming, data is streamed out from storage nodes; for live streaming, it uses a different set of nodes which distributes and replicate data streams in real-time across different viewers. The storage streaming services allow for data downloads not only for the content owners but also for the streamed viewers.

The storage streaming node actors include acceptors, replicators and storage verifiers, similar to the Sirius storage node because in actual sense storage streaming is just another form of interaction with the Sirius storage. The live streaming node has an altogether different process, hence different actors including Stream discovery node, stream landing node, stream verifier node, stream distributor node, stream sender, and the stream receiver. All of these actors have different functions which can be seen in Page 33|44 High-level technical Whitepaper.

The Sirius streaming services select the bests nodes to service consumers. It determines the best nodes based on the bandwidth statistics collected from them in an indeterministic way and uses this data to determine the performances of the available nodes (which is maintained in a list by the stream discovery nodes aforementioned) and assign reputations to the authenticated available nodes.

The live streaming protocol which allows for secure and anonymous yet public video and audio streams can be seen on Page 34-37 High-Level technical Whitepaper.


  • Sirius Database

This service is a private offering and is separate from the public platform. It is document-based storage with added blockchain properties which is available for applications that need database as part of their solution as they use the public network as well. It uses BigchainDB("IPDB") that stacks MongoDB for a distributed database and for its blockchain properties they emanate from using Tendermint as a consensus algorithm.

Like the blockchain, this service also runs in a decentralized manner with other blockchain properties such as transaction contracts, metadata storage, and asset management. It also maintains MongoDB as its ledger to store the chain of records identified by a hash. The MongoDB which powers the IPBD has features that ensure scalability. These features include high throughput and capacity as well as low latency.

The Sirius database is a component that is compatible with several technologies outside Proximax making it _ technology agnostic_. It's been confirmed that it is also compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and IPFS. The Sirius database allows an application to respond as though it was built with any other decentralized processing technologies and it provides the advantages of the pre-existing libraries as it has an underlying data store.


  • Sirius Content Review

This service allows content managers to facilitate a review process based on the consensus on the entire network. By this, contents that are generally considered inappropriate for the entire network or a particular section of it will be prevented from being published on the network.

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Maximize Sofware Development Proximax's Technologies

It could be that this project was named Proximax because of the realization of the max benefits available with the Proxi-mity to tools and resources and as such has created a technology to achieve this on the digital level, more specifically, on the blockosphere.

From this technology which Proximax has developed the following are the benefits available to maximize app and dapp development and deployment;

  1. No new technological know-how is needed. The supercontracts on Proximax's Sirius chain can be written on any of the mainstream languages as mentioned above. This allows a developer to directly start development with his language strength from the available compatible languages - eliminating the time taken to learn a new language and the mistakes that come with reinventing the wheel.

  2. The Sirius Chain being an updated or improved copy of one of the industry's tested and proven networks, NEM's Catapult, guarantees users of the scalability of the Sirius chain and its speed of handling transactions.

  3. Proximax's supercontracts allows for easy debugging and control hence facilitates the development of the dapps or apps or both.

  4. The combination of Proximax's technologies moves developers closer to their dream of utmost flexibility in tools, resources, and language compatibility. All the services a dapp or an app will need, Proximax has made available. its extended nature allows it to be compatible with further technological advancements required for dapp or app development.

  5. Proximax's ensures end-consumers receive fair services by combining to the Proof of Stake consensus algorithm, with its novel Proof of Greed Algorithm. Developers can be sure that transactions in their dapps occur with the minimum transaction fee possible as the network takes care of this for the developer.

  6. Considering that the platform has both data storage and streaming technologies, developers can utilize the platform to create applications of any kind, for a specific use case, with or without the use of blockchain properties.

  7. The consensus algorithm chosen by Proximax makes the network economically efficient as minimal hardware resource is required. This lowers the barrier of the network hence allowing for a large number of nodes to handle whatever application load developers place on it - maximizing its global scalability.

  8. It provides a fair, anonymous and economical way of streaming data with guaranteed up-time as both the streaming and storage nodes for the live and storage streaming services are fully decentralized. Down-time and unnecessary cost that arises from central models are eliminated.

  9. Developers have the tools required to create an economy around applications built by them on Proximax. Proximax also gives them the leisure to customize unique properties to their built economy.

  10. Developers have a platform with Proximax to carry out crowdfunding, to take their ideas off the ground.

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Proximax Tokenomy

Similar to other decentralized networks, Proximax institutes a tokenomics design that ensures sustainability and behavior governance. The design makes all network participants behave in line with the network interests while still collaborating with other participants.

Proximax's tokenomics design initiates and maintains self-organization and synergy of rational behavior of the network participants, makes the network adapt to adverse tactics and internal attacks of harmful participants. The design also encourages the use of the core services of the infrastructure and keeps the infrastructure extendible to make it receptive to plug-ins for the inclusion of other services.

Proximax has an internal and external token ecosystem. The internal ecosystem consists of Proximax's Native Token (XPX), Service Units, and Custom tokens known as mosaics. The external ecosystem consists of all payment methods which are integrated with an application. it could either be coins, tokens or fiat.

Utilizing the platform's services requires you to pay in the native token, XPX since the platform's services are tied to the blockchain protocol. XPX is exchanged through an Automated Inner Exchange to Service units. These service units can be compared to gas in the ethereum blockchain. There are four (4) types of service units and they are used to pay for the platform's services, incentivize service running nodes and to determine the service providing capacities of nodes.

Proximax's like ethereum network enables consumers to tokenize assets. It does this with its custom Tokens (Mosaics) feature. They are in-built contracts pre-defined on the blockchain protocol to allow them create digital representations of a real-life asset.

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A UseCase - Rich-Tv

Teren is a dapp developer and blockchain enthusiast. He stumbled upon cryptocurrencies and the blockchain in general at the end of 2017. He has explored so many blockchain projects and witnessed how many projects transformed a regular web project into a blockchain project.

Understanding fundamentally the technology, he could not yet develop the idea he had in mind into reality. He didn't have the resources to create his public fully decentralized blockchain but he loved the ethereum blockchain, so he decided to build his idea on the ethereum blockchain.

After his analysis of the ethereum blockchain, two challenges deterred his going further. The first was the need to learn a new programming language to execute his idea on the ethereum blockchain - Solidity. considering the speed at which the blockosphere grew, his idea would have been executed by another before he was done learning solidity.

Secondly, it is difficult and expensive to store and transact the kind of data his dapplication would require which are mostly video and audio data.

On the verge of giving up on his idea, he converses with his friend CED, who had been exposed to Proximax, the next-gen blockchain protocol. CED told Teren about this infrastructure, its receptiveness to a wide variety of languages and its compatibility with several content types.

Without the need to learn any new language or utilize an external decentralize storage like IPFS, he builds his streaming service named Rich-Tv.

Rich-Tv is a fictitious video and audio streaming services where end users can stream video and audio content with the ability to tip the content creators. end-users also have the option to book appointments with these authors if they possess a skill the consumer would like to learn and also the option to purchase the content provided by an author, such that any tip after he purchases it comes to him, the new owner. Teren also considered adding the feature of direct negotiation with content authors for ad placing.

The fast, secure and anonymous but yet public nature of the Proximax streaming services allows for transactions like this especially real-time tipping of live-streamed videos.

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Proximax Leaders.

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Source

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Proximax Technology Partners.

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Source

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Proximax Media Partners.

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Proximax Advisors

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Proximax RoadMap

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Source

In conclusion, Proximax is an infrastructure which by its combination of traditional blockchain protocols with peer-to-peer storage, streaming, and database services usher us into the next generation of the blockchain technology. In other words, we could say the Proximax is an all-in-one platform that is poised to adapt to new technologies considering its standardized extendible blockchain framework. The proximity of the tools or services, receptiveness of a wide variety of languages, and technology agnosticism of the Proximax infrastructure allow for max development and deployment of dapplications.

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Further Information & Resources

For more insight on the ProximaX technology, see video below...

Thanks for Reading...
CED.

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