To understand Cypherium’s technology, it helps to understand Cypherium’s vision of a decentralized future. Many in the crypto space fervently debate over what a world organized by decentralized technologies may look like. Some believe that one or two blockchains, Bitcoin and maybe Ripple or Ethereum, should anchor all decentralized apps, contracts, and endeavors — a kind of one-to-one replacement of the internet. Others imagine a more various decentralized landscape, with many specialized blockchains fulfilling the unique needs of enterprises and organizations. Of these two schools, we at Cypherium fall more toward the latter.
We have developed our network specifically to address the needs and shortcomings of our industry as it stands, and through this work, we hope to bring a more diversified, decentralized world into being. In much the same way that evolution has led to a proliferation of different forms of life on earth, as species progressed and became increasingly suited to their environments, so too will blockchains adapt to become more suitable for everyday life. Our project aims to keep the successful traits of our ancestors (Bitcoin, Ethereum) while augmenting them with new attributes that serve the needs of our ever-changing world. This is what is required of new projects aiming to solve the blockchain trilemma, given that our industry is constantly evolving to meet the needs of modern enterprises.
Customizing protocols in this adaptive way has led Cypherium to develop its multi-governance model. Cypherium separates the two constituent processes of traditional Bitcoin mining into two distinct blockchains: an election chain chooses Proof-of-Work leaders to write new blocks, while a transaction chain uses HotStuff-BFT consensus to verify the transaction data within those blocks. This structure aims to preserve the fundamental innovation of Bitcoin that many new protocols ignore in order to scale or to seem novel.
Cypherium endows each of these two layers, minting and verifying, autonomous governance. Anyone can join or leave the network at any time through Proof-of-Work, making it fully democratic; at the same time, the HotStuff-BFT layer is comprised of elected representatives of the total miner pool. That layer then may make choices for the network as they see fit, including creating and verifying blocks, or proposing protocol changes. This is a crucial development to negotiate the contesting desires of different network actors. For example, miners always want the price of coins to appreciate, while developers and users may want to keep the price steady so that their dApps and transactions remain affordable. Within the crypto space, and even within blockchain networks themselves, participants will develop competing interests. This is an inevitable aspect of bringing this technology to scale.
Mature blockchains increasingly will face problems of both horizontal and vertical conflict resolution. This is due to the fact that the space generally, and each project specifically, proposes a fundamental reorganization of the flow of capital and data. Multi governance is the only fair and viable allocation of power under these new systems, not only because of its historical precedent in global politics and economics but also because of its immediate need within the crypto space, which requires a high degree of collaboration and adaption in order to meet the world’s challenges as soon as possible. Cypherium believes in a multi-chain future that fosters possibility, innovation, and free association. That cannot happen without multi-governance.
