What incentive does the infrastructure provider have to host the hypervisor to run the unikernels if compute will be paid in the form of plasma (PoW or fused plasma)?
If network participants can justify to pay for more and more physical infrastructure with smaller and smaller amounts of QSR, would the amount of QSR needed for gas plausibly go down, as the price of QSR goes up?
Looks a lot like ICP’s reverse gas model. Infrastructure providers will likely be incentivized by receiving payments from hosted zApps. If a zApp is successful, it needs infrastructure to scale and the zApp needs to be able to pay for this extra infra.
As a service node operator, I want to get paid (maybe upfront) to keep the node up and running.
That’s pretty interesting… and there is nothing stopping a large company from running their own infrastructure to host their own zApp I assume.
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It will be a net benefit for the network (same logic applies to large mining companies that mine BTC).
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I’ll try to answer all questions to the best of my knowledge.
A decentralized application is an application deployed on a virtual machine running as a state machine on top of a (public) blockchain network.
A zApp is a special kind of dApp that can run on a VM that might not be directly running on a blockchain network and that has particularities such as custom gas mechanisms (for example dApps users pay gas upfront to execute state changes via transactions).
In the case of Uniswap, the code is running on every Ethereum node.
No, we don’t expect for a zApp to run on every Zenon node. Quite the contrary, we want zApps to have the best of both worlds: Web2 efficiency/performance and Web3 security/privacy.
Yes, this is an important distinction between dApps and zApps. You can think of zApps as layer-2 dApps for Zenon.
Actually, it will look like this: Unikernel > WASM runtime (with built-in gas metering and proper sandboxing) > zApp code
EVM is a smart contract runtime where Solidity code is compiled to EVM bytecode and ran on the EVM by every node in a blockchain network.
zApps will run WASM bytecode inside a WASM runtime inside the unikernel and will trigger state changes on a layer-2 with layer-1 settlement via an embedded contract.
The interface part will be no different from any other dApp interface. You are free to build any kind of interface (web/mobile/etc.) and interact with the zApp via RPCs (to call methods) and the corresponding ABI (to invoke functions).
Anyone that wants to be part of this ecosystem and earn rewards.
This is where the things get interesting. Regular dApps cannot scale to millions of users because of one main bottleneck: the underlying blockchain. In order to change the state of a particular dApp, you need to issue a transaction that is recorded on the blockchain. Now imagine 100 million users issuing transactions on Ethereum concurrently.
zApps of the hand can be integrated directly as a layer-2 solution that will work as follows:
- Users will deposit funds in dedicated zApps embedded. The embedded will keep track of balances and will update the state of the balances accordingly
- Sequencers will run the state transition function for zApps on a separate L2 chain
- Zero knowledge proofs will be used to attest the validity of the state transition executions for the L2 on the zApp embedded account-chain
I would encourage anyone to become an infrastructure provider. We can design a system that is more reliable in the long term by requiring a security deposit (a bond that can be slashed) or creating a ranking system based on uptime and other important metrics.
There are 3 different entities in the zApps ecosystem:
- The user that will pay to access/interact with zApps. Regular dApp users pay for every interaction with the smart contracts gas fees that are usually non-negligible.
- The zApp developer that wants to monetize it.
- The infrastructure provider that hosts the zApp.
We need to think of ways to create more demand for ZNN and/or QSR.
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Will Supernova handle this? Or is this a different L2?
I think Fusing QSR for Plasma to pay access/interact with zApp will create demand for QSR, and it will creat demand ZNN and staked it for QSR yield. I dont thing fuse plasma by POW will enough to interact with zApp
I was imagining zApp owners/users paying for “qas” (at a rate proportional to 1/nth of 1 QSR) directly. I don’t see how we could incorporate fusing in any way at the smart contract layer.
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Can I ask a clarifying point @aliencoder - when you say zApps are you referring to z(Zenon)Apps as in our implementation of dApps on Zenon, or a broader industry scaling of dApps to zApps (akin to zero knowledge proofs or something similar for example)
I think the distinction is important
I’m referring to Zenon Apps (zApps) that have their own unique architecture.
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Thanks for the breakdown @aliencoder - it helps a lot.
Professor just casually dropping “qas”. It’s so simple it’s genius. I love it.
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UPDATE: I am still working through iterations of a general unikernel “devkit” that supports a WASM runtime.
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Thank you.
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Is it a start of zApp work for next AZ ?
Enhance the security features of the unikernel by implementing advanced cryptographic algorithms and secure communication protocols.
Integrate support for smart contracts and decentralized applications (zApps) within the unikernel environment.
Conduct comprehensive testing and optimization to ensure reliability, scalability, and compatibility with Zenon’s blockchain network.
Hi EovE7Kj,
I was curious about how you are getting on with the project?
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hmm half a month without any feedback, did he quit or dr.blaze style?
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My guess is no. It’s summer and his work looks hard. If you are looking for an explanation or inspiration I highly recommend @zyler9985’s articles 
. They might help us understand why devs go radio silent for a while.
And in case you forgot our ethos read this post.
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Maybe that’s why we are where we are even after so many years…I know the saying, developers are still cooking… from this project you can see that a community driven project is not such a good way to go when you leave it at this stage and when there is almost no community left.
sorry, but the frustration is increasing every month and many people are just waiting for an opportunity to escape from here
To the people actually doing the work this is the only way to build a self sustaining long term project. If you really want to understand what we are building and why it’s taking so long and why devs come and go, read those articles. I hope they inspire you.
Read this one first: Why Zenon Is Going To Zero. Bitcoin’s early days were fraught with… | by Zyler9985 | Jun, 2024 | Medium
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