W3 POC

Ethereum and all blockchains are great, but expensive, either in setting up or maintenance. W3 is a new kind of Consensusless Blockchain, which drops the most expensive part of traditional blockchains, the consensus, and turns the integrity and double-spending proof problem of blockchains into a universal truth plus message delivery guarantee problem.

W3 POC is a javascript DApp leveraging IPFS and libp2p to test the application protocol of W3. Libp2p connects webpages (swarms) of nodes into a large and easy to extend testbed, and IPFS makes it ubiquitously accessible. We use it to illustrate & debug the two stages block mint protocol of W3, as well as to benchmark W3’s theoretical performance and resource consumption, and to observe the security results of W3 against a bunch of well-known attacks.

The primary testing result is amazing. W3’s resource consumption is only 1/1,000 or even less comparing to others, and it’s immune from finny/race attack and very unlikely be a victim of a sybil attack. Meanwhile, the W3 POC can also be extended to test other P2P application protocols as well.

This project is javascript DApp, it implements the W3 consensusless blockchain protocol with a swarm of W3 nodes within a webpage and then connected all swarms into a large testbed. Nodes pass messages through EventEmitter2 within a swarm and then through libp2p across swarms. Vue and ECharts are used for visualization. A Github CI/CD action is setup for automatically distribute the whole DApp via IPFS, and we will use the web3.storage to record/publish the testing results in the upcoming version.