In this article, we launch a series of writings unveiling our vision – how we aim to redefine global commerce. But first, let’s take a look at the actual elephant in the room.
During peak demand, on Amazon Prime Day 2022, Amazon e-shop backend core – nosql cluster DynamoDB, essentially a state database, reached a performance of a whooping 105.2 million requests a second (source – Amazon dev team themselves). Read this line once again. It’s one hundred million requests each second. 6 billion each minute, 60B every 10 minutes – each bitcoin block. A couple trillion state updates each day.
To par with what Amazon e-shop is casually doing each present day, the crypto world will need 2000 Solana networks running in parallel, and extremely efficiently communicating between each other. Or 200 TON blockchains (each fine-tuned to 500k tps). Or 15000 Polygon blockchains, or 7 million Ethereum chains. You can pick your favorite horse in this race against a Tesla Model S Plaid.
This problem is not new, and it is actually well-known in the blockchain world, as a “blockchain trilemma” and was first articulated by Vitalik. But in our dev team, we prefer to call its origin name, a CAP theorem – one of the pillars of computer science, formulated back in 2000. In very simple words, i.e. as a very naive approximation, as the conclusion of this theorem, we can say that a significantly scalable account-based-smart-contract blockchain is impossible. Vitalik in a nutshell just introduced “decentralization” and “security” components into the original defining of the theorem and thus narrowed down its scope from every kind of storage system to solely a globally consistent state system (that is account-based-smart-contract blockchain)
However, you can ask, why any blockchain can barely achieve a million TXs, while Amazon DynamoDB is casually doing 10s million just for one of its clients. The thing, DynamoDB had dropped to achieve infinite scalability (as per the CAP theorem) is “consistency”. In a blockchain language – the global consistent state.
Many teams are working hard to scale the global consistent accounts state (look at the TON, Near, Solana). But with all due respect to the brightest minds, it honestly looks like they are trying to beat the Math. Every 10k tx/s is really hard to gain there. Like every kilogram on the barbell of the bodybuilder, but his rival in the weightlifting competition is a construction crane.
But the light in this tunnel for blockchains is hidden right here. In the same CAP theorem. As one of its corollaries, we can see that UTXO-based architectures, as is the Bitcoin BTC, can be infinitely scalable, and even more intriguing – it isn’t rocket science at all to scale UTXO-based smart contracts.
In one of the past articles we already tapped into that field, mentioning our vision of scaling on Ordinals. Boldly speaking, we believe that we already can technically achieve Amazon levels of performance, on Ordinals, on BTC. Of course, lots of development still needs to be done, and we need to purchase a data center first, but technically it’s possible.
Many teams are currently building on Bitcoin. Many interesting developments are already there, and many more are yet to come. But in our engineering team, we selected a proven old classic solution. OG will use peer-to-peer payment channels, where users transact directly with each other and avoid settling the TXs on the global chain for as long as possible. The concept is already known as the lighting network on BTC. Ordinals and specially designed metaprotocols are actually a perfect fit to be used in the lightning network because of the self-descriptive recursive content and non-fungible nature of satoshis themselves.
What payment channels will bring to Ordinals:Goods in particular? OG metaprotocol is entirely UTXO-based, without “cashiers” and transfer inscriptions. Thus, OG inscriptions can be easily locked in payment channels or any kind of smart contracts, on L1 and any L2s. We call that concept inscription staking. OG users will be able to stake their subscription or goods inscriptions, enabling prolonged utility extraction. We envision goods to be freely transferable on Bitcoin, across all marketplaces and all DeFi contracts, thus our payment channels system won’t constrain any possible integration with L2s
Ordinals:Goods users in the future will be able to order the delivery of goods to their apartment only once in one small TX on L2, lock their goods as collateral for a loan on a lightning channel, and not pay any fees at all forever. Or stake in a smart contract and receive lightning network micro-payments to his account each day from the global goods sales.
With users transacting with each other in a peer-to-peer manner, Ordinals will never truly face a scaling limit, allowing for the flourishing of free global peer-to-peer commerce.
by Ilia Obraztsov, CTO of Ordinals:Goods