As BitCoin ABC and nChain continue to play on BitCoin Cash BCH, 190 tokens have been issued for smart contracts deployed on BCH. The wormhole protocol, as the project is called, took shape after two months of closed-door development and was officially unveiled at BCH’s one-year anniversary press conference. From the concept stage to the online operation of the wormhole protocol, BCH not only experienced the stage of seeking new value support in the future, but also caught up with the dispute of BCH involved in the division of the community. It made the idea of issuing tokens on Bitcoin come true a few years ago. At a time when bitcoin belief was the dominant value in the cryptocurrency community, this would have been an act of defiance. With the discovery of OP_RETURN metadata in the Bitcoin protocol, the success of USDT using OmniLayer, and the emergence of BCH, the birth of the wormhole protocol became a logical step. “None of this would have been possible without the open spirit, without the open source community.” “Said Jiazhi Jiang, a developer of the wormhole protocol.
Papers around | edit | knife ideal “everyone can be the time of issuing”
“Dear plum, here is the coin I promised you.” That’s how MayCoin, with asset ID 163, describes its original purpose in the Wormhole browser. The 100,000 Token may never be traded or invested, but it was written into the Bitcoin Cash block at 9:29 PM on August 1, 2018 by a “willing heart” using the wormhole. The BCH “me” behind the wormhole protocol
Token “Declaration” on wormhole Protocol browser
On August 1, at the “ecological construction project press conference” marking the first anniversary of the birth of Bitcoin Cash, the wormhole was officially unveiled. Jiang Jiazhi, the project leader, said simply, “The wormhole protocol is to realize the issuance of tokens without changing the BCH consensus protocol.” As of today, there are 191 tokens issued using wormholes. Of course, the vast majority of Token offerings are still, like MayCoin, individual experiments, and there are no well-known tokens with commercial or economic designs. But as the wormhole originator of ID16 said, “The time has come when everyone can issue coins. The future has arrived.” The phrase is familiar, a slogan monetary liberals embraced after the birth of Ethereum. Mr Jiang has more confidence in the development of wormholes for smart contracts, “because they are built on a decentralized BCH network with more room for performance”. The emergence of the wormhole allows the idea of issuing tokens using the Bitcoin protocol to be realized in BCH, the forked network of Bitcoin. The wormhole project began closed development in June. At that time, Bitcoin Cash was undergoing a hard fork, and after the fork, the block cap of BCH was increased from 8MB to 32MB. As a payment system, expanding again means BCH can handle more transactions, but statistics from cryptocurrency research firm Chainlysis show that commercial use of BCH tailed off between march and may this year, with BCH payments falling by nearly 60% in two months. Just one month before the wormhole was approved, BCH’s floating market value shrank again, from 29.7 billion DOLLARS to 16.4 billion dollars in one month. The forked currency, which once diverted adherents from the bitcoin community under the banner of “big Block,” did not surpass its predecessor in price, as enthusiasts had hoped. Ten years in the making, with 20 million users, BTC has always been thinking about “how to become more valuable”. It is in this context that the wormhole starts a process of BCH self-revolution and evolution. “For users, the arrival of the wormhole will greatly improve the utilization rate of BCH.” Jiang jiazhi said. In May this year, Jiang Jiazhi, Jiang Heping, and Wen Long, all senior members of the BCH community, began to plan the implementation of a smart contract for Bitcoin Cash. Jiang Jiazhi, who has 10 years of experience in Internet development, is the main person in charge of the project. He has been in touch with bitcoin since 2013 and is a big fan of the currency. Developed Beitai Wallet is the only wallet recommended by Bitcoin.org that was developed by a Chinese. When leading the team to close the wormhole, Jiang jiazhi and his partners looked at almost all the relevant schemes for issuing tokens, but there was no good solution. Finally, they found the possibility in Omni Layer protocol. The OmniLayer protocol, which runs on the bitcoin blockchain, uses the OP_RETURN opcode to implement the Token issuance scheme, which is known as USDT (Teda Coin) issuance and circulation. The possibility of issuing tokens using the Bitcoin protocol is buried in the OP_RETURN opcode. Jiang jiazhi recalled that in the early bitcoin developer community, there was the idea of issuing tokens on BTC. OP_RETURN metadata was introduced in 2013 to make it easier for users to record part of their information on the blockchain. Geeks have found that calling this manipulation code not only allows data to be broadcast and recorded in the blockchain, but also saves time and computation power by bypassing computation steps. OP_RETURN is also transparent and non-modifiable. Many people are aware of these features and use them to store information and develop decentralized apps. The metadata, then only 80 bytes long, was full of imagination. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, is the most well-known person to call OP_RETURN on the Bitcoin protocol to develop smart contract issuance. At that time, he was not “V god”. But the OP_RETURN feature has raised concerns among the Core team, the Core developers of Bitcoin, that the invocation of one-yuan data will cause users to store too much non-transaction information on the bitcoin network, affecting the normal use of Bitcoin. After that, they reduced OP_RETURN to 40 bytes. That move directly changed Vitalik Buterin’s thinking about creating smart contracts on Bitcoin. At the time, he later recalled on Twitter, some Bitcoin developers might have thought he was going to pull the rug out from under him by developing Ethereum, “like banning certain data encoding methods used in transactions. I didn’t want to write Ethereum in a potentially hostile environment. The result is that OP_RETURN is actually reduced to 40 bytes.”
The BCH “me” behind the wormhole protocol
Core’s rejection may have helped ethereum grow on its own. At the time, Jiang jiazhi, a bitcoin believer, scoffed at Ethereum. “I thought ethereum was air at first. At that time, we only saw bitcoin. Now look, Ethereum is a success, and obviously, I got punched in the face.” Perhaps since being punched in the face by Ethereum, Jiang has developed a deeper understanding of “openness”, which is also the concept they have been following when developing the wormhole for BCH ecological development. “The Omni Layer protocol is a mature solution verified by USDT.” For the sake of feasibility, the wormhole protocol development team boldly ported Omni Layer and deployed it on the BLOCKCHAIN of BCH, thus realizing the function of issuing tokens. The Wormhole protocol native Token, named Wormhole Cash (WHC), enables the BCH blockchain with bitcoin functions to realize the basic functions of Token issuance, transfer and burning without changing the existing BCH consensus rules. Compared with Ethereum, Jiang jiazhi believes that the large capacity of BCH leaves the possibility of convenient and efficient expansion for wormhole to solve THE TPS problem.
From closed-door development to launch, there have been doubts around the wormhole. Safety, the means of obtaining WHC, and the future of the project are all debated. Wormholes have been publicly attacked by Craig S Wright, an Australian scientist who was once a big supporter of BCH and recently joined the community divide by pushing for a fork in BCH and a return to the original bitcoin protocol. He believes that burning BCH in exchange for WHC destroys Bitcoin cash and forces users into wormholes. WHC generation uses proof-of-burn mechanism. Users can obtain WHC by sending BCH to a specific address. The minimum exchange rate is 1BCH, and the exchange ratio is 1BCH=100WHC. The exchange is one-way and users cannot exchange WHC for BCH.
“It’s one-way anchoring. Of course, two-way anchoring is better, but it’s not possible with current technology.” Jiang jiazhi explained that bidirectional anchoring can be achieved through gateways, but this approach is suitable for use in centralized networks, and BCH is a decentralized network. Currently, there is no viable two-way anchoring method that is both secure and decentralized and effective against the inevitable rollback risk of blockchain. “Security is more important for digital assets,” he said. In addition to the feasibility of one-way anchor generation, wormholes and their Token WHC, as part of THE BCH ecosystem, are also more conducive to the value complementarity of both parties in terms of design. “Because WHC is produced by burning BCH, which is irreversible, the amount of BCH is gradually reduced by this mechanism. According to the principle of ‘less is more expensive’, the price of BCH will increase as the amount of BCH decreases. On the other hand, if there are more and more projects in the wormhole, the value of WHC will be passed on to BCH.” “Said one investor bullish on the wormhole project. The BCH “me” behind the wormhole protocol
Compared with the price factor, Jiang jiazhi, as one of the “fathers” of the wormhole, hopes that the BCH soil can be used for the growth of the project in its early stage. “From the market value, BCH currently ranks high in the market value and has a large user base, which is conducive to the future development of the wormhole.” At the end of August, doubts about the safety of the wormhole resurfaced, forcing Jiang to make a public response. He explained that the wormhole protocol is based on the Omni protocol and has the same security as Omni protocol, which runs USDT, a key infrastructure in blockchain, and is now valued at around $2.7 billion. “Should anyone who says that wormholes or Omni protocols are not secure point out why they are not secure? You can also try to hack the USDT!” In addition, Jiang jiazhi said that the wormhole is built on the BCH network, and the security of BCH transactions and the decentralized timestamp service of BCH protocol ensure the security of the wormhole. As for the community disputes, he believes that using wormhole is using BCH, because wormhole relies on existing BCH protocol and network development, as an open source project, no one can stop the development of wormhole protocol on BCH, “and the future goal of wormhole is to encourage developers to do unlicensed innovation on the second layer of BCH.”
“No matter BTC or BCH, the open source community itself is a free and open community. Without the expansion of BCH, it would be difficult for developers to restore and modify some opcodes and issue tokens on the Bitcoin protocol.” The programmer, who has spent 10 years in Internet development, often recalls 1995, “when people were talking about what the @ symbol was, just like they’re talking about blockchain today.” “Less than 0.5 percent of the population should be using cryptocurrencies, so it’s too early to say who will ultimately win.” Jiang jiazhi said that more users are outside the blockchain, and the evolution direction of any future project should be to attract more users to use blockchain. As Jeremy Clarek writes in The Long Road to Bitcoin, the road to bitcoin has been littered with numerous failed attempts. The same is true for BCH.