Everscale unveils roadmap for 2022

In the Everscale blog (formerly Free TON) they published a roadmap for developing the ecosystem in 2022. The document was prepared by the Everscale DeFi Alliance.

The founder of Broxus, Sergey Shashev (the company is part of the alliance and sits on Everscale’s management council) said that the authors “synchronised their positions” with EverX (formerly TON Labs) and the project’s subgovernances.

The program, in particular, includes improvements to the network protocol and Ever OS, the release of tools and documentation for developers, the development of NFT, DeFi and GameFi tracks, and integration with other blockchain platforms.

According to the roadmap, in the first quarter of this year the Everscale protocol will undergo changes that will enable the network fees to be reduced significantly—by as much as 100 times. In the third quarter, dynamic fee pricing will be introduced, depending on network load.

In the same quarter, the zk-SNARK protocol is planned to be released. This should become perhaps one of the most important achievements, the document says, as it will allow private transactions and private blockchains to be launched. This implies the onboarding of commercial organisations into Everscale. Thanks to this feature, Everscale should be able to compete on equal terms with projects such as Corda, Hyperledger or VeChain, the roadmap authors say.

In the second quarter, a new consensus mechanism named Soft Majority Fault Tolerance (SMFT) is expected to replace the Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) variant, which will increase security and throughput as the number of validators grows.

“BFT has a nonlinear increase in messages as the number of participants grows. Therefore, by definition, it is not scalable. Creating many levels of BFT consensus — master chain, shardchains and so on — nonlinearly increases finality time, which we can observe in the current design. This problem is not solvable within BFT. Before the creation of SMFT there was no algorithm of consensus in which it was solved,” explained EverX’s chief technical officer Dmitry Goroshkevsky.

In its turn, by the fourth quarter developers plan to shorten finality time. In total, as Dmitry Goroshkevsky noted, finality in the Everscale network currently takes around 10 seconds. With the transition to SMFT its duration should drop to 1 second.

A substantial part of the roadmap is tied to decentralised finance. Thus, in the third quarter there should be a launch of a decentralised exchange with an order book called FLEX.

“Previously, DEXs with an order book were deemed impractical due to limitations of smart contract performance on other networks, but Everscale can provide the scalability and high speed that such a exchange requires,” note the document’s authors.

Already in the first quarter there should be a launch of a DeFi protocol for loans and deposits. And by the end of 2022 in Everscale there will appear an open protocol for trading futures and options. As Broxus founder Sergey Shashev said, a partner from the Near project will help port the existing protocol to Everscale’s technology.

Substantial attention was also given to integration with other blockchain ecosystems. Thus, the previously launched cross-chain bridge between Everscale and Cardano should become a hub for transferring liquidity from Cardano to other networks compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Among them are Polygon, Binance Smart Chain and Fantom Opera.

Also, Everscale intends to broaden cooperation with Tezos. According to Sergey Shashev, it will include configuring a cross-chain bridge and products related to penetrating into other networks.

“I mean services for these networks that will allow them to solve problems for users and at the same time increase our adoption. We frequently position ourselves as layer-2 network, that is, solving user problems, thereby expanding our user base,” said a representative of Everscale.

In the middle of the year, developers plan to launch pilot projects in GameFi. These will be mods for online games GTA and Minecraft, and will include features such as land tokenisation, real estate and items, NFT imports and more.

In the second quarter, the implementation of a pilot SSI project will begin: a decentralised digital profile that can be integrated into applications on Everscale.

Earlier in the project, a broad investor outreach program was started, and the Simplex payment processing service added support for EVER coin.

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