It’s with great excitement that we announce Mutual Knowledge Systems, Inc. (MuKn) has joined the Grants Program and is creating a new solution that will enable the safe deployment of new smart contract capabilities on Nervos similar to those available on Ethereum.
With the new grant, the MuKn team will receive both financial and technical support from Nervos as it works to bring many of the features of an account model to Nervos, as well as other UTXO-model-based blockchains such as Cardano and Bitcoin Cash.
UTXO vs. Account/Balance System
The Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) model and the account model refer to the record-keeping models popular in today’s blockchain landscape used to prove ownership of tokens. While they serve a similar purpose, the two models have stark differences that impact smart contract security, which is particularly important for DeFi projects.
Inspired by Bitcoin, Nervos uses a generalized version of the Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) model called the Cell Model, which retains the consistency and simplicity of Bitcoin. On Nervos CKB, all the states are stored in Cells, all computation is done off-chain, and all the verification work is handled by nodes.
The “Account-View-on-UTXO” model proposed by MuKn takes the convenience of interacting with decentralized apps (dApps) using the account model and makes it accessible on Nervos.
The Account-View-on-UTXO Model
The proposed model solves two main problems that plague UTXO-based chains:
- Susceptibility to DoS attacks. Open smart contracts that have an unlimited number of participants or transactions are subject to Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, where users are prevented from interacting with them. By making these transactions more flexible, intermediaries (or miners) can compete to get the transactions accepted by the blockchain in exchange for a fee.
- Smart contract flexibility. Writing UTXO unlocking scripts wherein transactions have enough flexibility to enable users to interact with contracts as if the blockchain were using an account model.
The Grants Program
MuKn is the latest project to join Nervos’ mission to improve the UXTO model. Last year, Nervos announced it had entered into a research partnership with IOHK, the creators of Cardano, which focuses on UTXO ledgers and smart contracts to develop an improved framework for other UTXO-based blockchains.
For all of the details regarding this project, follow the Nervos Talk thread.
Learn more about the Nervos Grants program and how to apply at https://www.nervos.org/developer/grants/.
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