Everscale, The Network to Boast Its Infinite Scalability

• The Everscale Network was launched to address the issue of scalability faced by most blockchains.
• EVER is the innate token on the network.

The distributed ledger technology is based on providing economic incentives to the different nodes in the network which leads to the development of a cryptocurrency. The two are inseparable and blockchains are empowered by cryptocurrencies. Not the trust, but the need to trust is eliminated in this trustless system. The earliest decentralized model with economic incentives was developed by Satoshi Nakamoto followed by Ethereum developing a Turing-complete-programming. 

The Indelible Centralization Everscale

Most of the decentralization in said networks is only on the protocol level and will run back to centralization in times of decision-making requiring social consensus. The software codebase of Bitcoin is still under a centralized warehouse. The increased mining costs have led to only a few mining pools controlling the majority of the mining operations for Bitcoin and Ethereum. Networks on their launch distribute grants to the developer’s team and most of the tokens end up in the hands of early investors and whales. 

The characteristic property of Proof of Stake (PoS) is that it requires the validators to stake something that they would fear losing and motivate them to maintain the correctness of the blockchain. Thus, most of the networks engage in a presale to provide that something (tokens) to future validators and start the game. 

Everscale, instead of selling tokens, relies on the Meritocratic Token Distribution (MTD) model. Any member can propose a Contest whose results will benefit the network. All the members can participate in this contest and based on their solutions to the problem are rewarded with tokens and start the game. Participants earn tokens based on their merits. 

Everscale uses the Soft Majority Voting (SMV) Mechanism where instead of forcing everyone to vote, people who care are only made part of the decision. If a node has no opinion or is unwilling to vote, they are considered neutral. Any decision is implemented based on a simple metric of % yes minus % no. If only 15% said Yes and none said No, the decision is assumed to have majority support and no objections. This prevents the chances of an attack, where a smart contract may buy voting rights in exchange for tokens, as each negative vote by an honest user has more power. 

The gas fees for the network are decided using a dynamic network price model which allows the already infinitely scalable Everscale to allow even more new validators to join the network. The gas price should not be high which will be upsetting for new participants. However, it should not be too low as well or it may allow for a penny attack. This model also snatches the rights from validators to choose and decide the order of transactions which is prevalent in all existing blockchains and shapes the form of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV).

The Ever Kernel Everscale (EK)

The infrastructure on which the overscale network was built by Dr. Nikolai Durov and called, in computer terms, the Ever Kernel.

It is a multilevel blockchain network with the three levels being a master chain, work chains, and shard chains. The blocks of the master chain contain the most important information of the network and are responsible for the verification of IR’s main data. Workchains are responsible for the deployment of dAppa, smart contracts, and buying and selling of crypto. If the capacity of all the current workchains is utilized by 90%, new ones can be proposed in the elections. The shardchains (subchains) are created using the endless sharding process and have their independent process. 

The consensus model by Everscale is the Soft Majority Fault Tolerance (SMFT. While most networks are dependent on BFT consensus, which assumes that at least 66% of the nodes are honest, it leads to network delays because of the intensive message exchanges between the various nodes. In SMFT, a consensus can be reached even if 10% of Yes votes come with no negative votes. This consensus threshold can gradually be increased until the majority threshold (51%) is reached. 

Final Thoughts

The everscale network is aimed to increase scalability up to the level of supporting several million TPS. The project was initially developed as Telegram Open Network (TON by the Durov brothers) but struggled to launch because of legal proceedings. The Free TON project was later launched, using the open source code of TON, in May 2020 and later rebranded itself to Everscale in 2021.