In the competitive landscape of public blockchains, what are the highlights of Starcoin, which is about to launch its mainnet?

This article is an original piece by Chain Catcher, authored by Hu Tao.

Looking at it now, the market space for leading public chains is increasingly being recognized, with the ecological construction of multiple public chains thriving. Cardano, which has faced considerable criticism, recently went live on Coinbase, and it is foreseeable that the situation of diverse public chain technology solutions will continue for a long time.

Recently, Chain Catcher has noticed a brand new public chain project called Starcoin, which is positioned as a next-generation layered smart contract and distributed finance network. The project team has announced that the mainnet will soon go live and launch a "Security Bounty Program." The development team includes former Weibo technical management member Tim and renowned architect Jolestar, among others. According to insiders, several industry figures, including Bitcoin Star, participated in the project's early investment.

Will Starcoin, after its mainnet launch, be able to further stir the fiercely competitive public chain market and secure a place for itself? With this question in mind, we carefully studied Starcoin's technical white paper and found that the project's design mechanisms and technical foundation possess some unique performance advantages. Therefore, this article will provide a systematic interpretation of the Starcoin public chain and a horizontal comparison with some similar projects for readers' reference.

Recently, the public chain track has once again become the focus of the crypto market, with tokens from public chain projects like Polkadot, Cosmos, Algorand, Stellar, Fantom, and Harmony performing remarkably in the secondary market, with increases of over ten times since last year. The story of the "Ethereum killer" seems to have gained more recognition.

The main reason lies in the increasingly prominent performance bottlenecks of Ethereum, where transaction fees can reach fifty or sixty dollars. Meanwhile, the plans for Layer 2 and ETH 2.0 have yet to be realized, which also restricts the ecological landing of blockchain applications.

At the same time, considering that different application scenarios have varying architectural and performance requirements for blockchain networks—such as games, finance, and streaming—the characteristics differ greatly. It is almost impossible for a single public chain to meet the demands of all scenarios simultaneously, and the growing maturity of cross-chain technology will further break down barriers between major public chains. Therefore, the probability of multi-chain parallel development in the future is very high.

In this context, the situation of diverse public chain technology solutions will continue for a long time. Around elements such as technical architecture, economic models, community building, and ecological applications, public chain projects will further stimulate the potential and vitality of blockchain technology in competition, promoting the large-scale landing of applications that truly have market demand, transitioning from DeFi to broader real-world industries.

From the perspective of the domestic public chain landscape, current leading public chains include Nervos, Conflux, Platon, and Vechain, which have gained relatively higher market heat and recognition due to their innovative technical routes and support from some local governments. Recently, their token prices have also seen good increases, but in terms of application landing, they are still in a very early stage, far from the ecological level of Ethereum and other public chains.

Starcoin is a newly emerged public chain project, positioned as a next-generation layered smart contract and distributed finance network, allowing blockchain to be applied in more fields with lower barriers. According to Chain Catcher, this project is developed by the Westar Blockchain Laboratory.

The background of the development team is also quite impressive, including former Weibo technical management member Tim and renowned architect Jolestar, among others. Additionally, several well-known industry figures, including Bitcoin Star, have participated in investing in this project.

Currently, Starcoin is in the testing phase before the mainnet launch. On March 24, this public chain officially launched a month-long "Starcoin Security Bounty Program", aiming to attract external developers to test the potential vulnerabilities in the Starcoin blockchain test network system through high rewards. The maximum reward is 5000 USDT plus 5000 STC, and developers can receive a free Starcoin mining machine from the project team by submitting valid bugs on the GitHub page, allowing them to mine Starcoin mainnet coins after the mainnet goes live.

The generous rewards reflect the project's emphasis on network security. Public chains are the most complex systemic engineering in blockchain networks and are also an important infrastructure for the industry. Paying attention to security is also the responsibility of the project team.

So, in the fierce competition among public chains, why does Starcoin still aim at the DeFi field and attempt to compete with Ethereum? From the project's white paper and other materials, Starcoin's confidence may mainly come from four design ideas and their combinations.

First, compared to most public chains currently using PoS consensus mechanisms, and even Ethereum planning to transition to PoS, Starcoin still adheres to the most decentralized PoW consensus mechanism, but has also undergone significant optimization. It introduces an uncle block mechanism (note: see explanation at the end) and assesses network congestion based on the uncle block rate within the difficulty adjustment cycle, dynamically adjusting block size and block generation speed to improve network throughput without compromising network security.

At the same time, Starcoin counts all gas consumption within a difficulty adjustment cycle and dynamically adjusts the gas limit based on block generation speed. When the network is congested, the system can increase the gas limit of the block, and vice versa, thus avoiding extreme situations where gas fees rise sharply, providing users with a fast transaction experience.

Second, the project adopts the MOVE programming language developed by Facebook specifically for Libra, which is a development language designed for digital assets. It also optimizes the shortcomings of Ethereum's Solidity language, such as the lack of support for formal verification. Many settings are not very developer-friendly.

According to an article by the Nervos development company, MiYuan Technology, Solidity currently has three major issues: First, it cannot directly describe assets; assets are encoded as a number without a type. Second, scarcity cannot be scaled. These languages can only describe one type of scarce asset. Scarcity is hard-coded into the language's semantics, and user-defined assets must be very carefully re-implemented for scarcity. Third, access control is not flexible; access control is embedded in the language's semantics, and users cannot define their own access control policies.

In contrast, the MOVE language uses a bottom-up static type system, supports formal verification, and has stricter logical constraints, allowing most resource usage errors to be checked by the compiler before code deployment. It not only supports smart contracts but also allows for the creation of custom resource types inspired by linear logic; the module system can package and encapsulate the concept of digital assets, enabling developers to implement flexible permission control on module interfaces.

Third, Starcoin has designed a flexible on-chain governance mechanism, with the main feature being its metaprogramming capabilities. Currently, most public chains cannot dynamically adjust the rules of governance itself through decentralized governance. However, Starcoin can achieve decentralized governance of the governance parameters and mechanisms of the system itself through its on-chain governance strategy, achieving a higher degree of decentralization than other public chains. At the same time, Starcoin users need to stake their governance token STC to participate in voting governance.

It is worth noting that another feature of Starcoin is that it directly embeds contract governance into Starcoin's contract standard library, allowing projects on this public chain to conduct decentralized governance without integrating third-party DAO tools, lowering the development threshold for project teams and facilitating community building.

Fourth, the project adopts a controllable state storage mechanism, effectively alleviating the state explosion problem faced by Ethereum. Recently, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin emphasized the severity of the state data explosion problem in his article "Proposals for Managing Ethereum State Scale":

"One of the most enduring and unresolved challenges facing the Ethereum protocol is the problems arising from the continuous growth of state data size. Many operations on the Ethereum blockchain (creating accounts, writing to a contract storage slot, etc.) add state content to Ethereum, and all full nodes must store the entire state data to verify and produce new blocks."

According to statistics from etherscan.io, the current storage data size of the most popular Ethereum full node GETH has reached 671.29 GB, while this data was only 270.59 GB during the same period last year.

To address this issue, Starcoin's solution is to abstract state-related information into resources, dividing them into resource and code, where Resource is used to store user-related digital asset information, and code stores user contract scripts.

The storage of these resources still imposes considerable cost pressure on nodes running Starcoin. Starcoin plans to further achieve balance through a state storage billing strategy, similar to the mechanisms of Nervos and EOS, to incentivize users to delete or clean up some old state resources, thereby improving the overall storage efficiency of the network.

By fully absorbing industry experience and innovative ideas, Starcoin has largely addressed the "impossible triangle" problem of decentralization, security, and scalability through the aforementioned designs, while providing a fully optimized operating environment for financial applications, possessing the strength to compete with other mainstream public chains in terms of technology and performance.

As the mainnet and its security bounty program enter the launch phase, Starcoin will further announce specific progress in its DeFi layout. This will also be the most challenging hurdle for all public chain projects. Currently, the vast majority of public chains have made little progress in this area, making it difficult to attract and motivate developers to build applications long-term. If Starcoin's strategy is appropriate, it will have the opportunity to achieve breakthroughs in this aspect and form competitive barriers, but this remains to be observed.

As mentioned earlier, the current landscape of public chains still has significant variables and requires more exploration and practice of technical solutions to truly promote the large-scale commercial application of blockchain technology, and this goal is getting closer.

Note 1: If multiple miners mine new blocks at the same block height, one block will become a block on the longest chain, while other blocks, if referenced by subsequent blocks, will be called uncle blocks.

Note 2: More project information can be found at https://starcoin.org.