BLOCKBTC
Blocknet / Bitcoin
crypto

Blocknet is a cross-chain peer-to-peer protocol that allows nodes on separate networks to communicate and execute both value and data transfers. The team developed their own blockchain with a native token of BLOCK used to pay execution fees. Blocknet's core technology includes three components: XBridge (an iInter-chain network overlay), XName (a blockchain router), and XChat (a peer-to-peer data transport mechanism). The XBridge is a serverless DHT-based peer-to-peer network. DHT is a secure protocol used by services like BitTorrent and the Pirate Bay to locate users without requiring the IP addresses of network peers. XBridge enables searching for, locating, and broadcasting between nodes on different blockchains so Blocknet can send transaction information through APIs to more than one blockchain. XName is a blockchain router, which takes the information throughput of XBridge and applies it to different blockchains in the Block network via an inter-chain address system. XName is still early-stage technology, and the main challenge in developing this system is the tradeoff between cost and truthfulness of lookups performed on different networks. Looking up information on different blockchains requires node involvement for which certain incentives are necessary, and this may increase the cost of doing business on Blocknet. Currently Blocknet mitigate these costs by allowing nodes to bootstrap themselves through a hard-coded query to a trusted provider or by querying their peers on XBridge. But these are temporary solutions since they involve trusted intermediaries. XChat is the peer-to-peer data transport for Blocknet, which decentralized application (dapps) developers commonly used when building on a particular chain (e.g. Ethereum's Whisper). XChat allows dapps to perform more complex trustless operations on the blockchain besides simply transferring value. This communication protocol is important to allowing dapps to signal to each other via publish small amounts of information when being used. In essence, XChat is a small end-to-end encrypted peer-to-peer chat-room module for dapps running on separate blockchains.