Crypto Society Ama Recap with Notoros, 25th November 2021
The Next Generation of Immutable Database.
Notoros is a protocol created by Notoros, Inc. and built on Radix that provides a developer-friendly framework for building composable decentralized applications. It takes a fundamentally different approach to the way blockchains and applications interact, providing developers with all of the tools they need to build the next generation of dApps.
We envision a world with seamlessly interconnected data, where transparency, resiliency, and immutability create the foundation for a new stage of the economy, and a new era of trust for humankind.
Bilo | Crypto Society
It’s our pleasure to have you with us today. I would like to welcome you here on behalf of our entire community.
Notoros Official
It’s a pleasure to be here. Having fun working with the Crypto Society team.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Likewise. Thanks 🙂
Could we begin with a brief history of yourself and your team, and your roles at NOTOROS and what you were doing before NOTOROS ?
Notoros Official
My name is Andrew Brick. I am CPO and Co-Creator of Notoros Protocol.
I originally went to university for electrical engineering, where I was concentrating on energy storage technologies. I was an early adopter of Bitcoin mining.
For those who haven’t had a chance yet, you can learn more about our work at Notoros.io
Bilo | Crypto Society
How early sir?
Notoros Official
2012
I honestly didn’t think much about it until the end of my Bachelor’s degree. I was already leaning away from my hardware research and into software. That summer I began working at an internship at a cybersecurity firm. During that internship I discovered Steemit, which was an early sort of blockchain-based reddit. To my colleagues it didn’t seem like a huge innovation, but I saw tremendous potential in committing “upvotes & downvotes” to the blockchain in a trustless fashion.
I decided I would use this to create some sort of decentralized democracy machine using blockchain. An hour or two into my research I discovered The DAO… a decentralized democracy organization, which at the time was going through tremendous turmoil because its smart contracts had just been hacked. The fate of the experimental network and the corresponding fork were still unclear at the time. From that point on I took a deep dive into smart contracts, dapps, and distributed computing…
Bilo | Crypto Society
Wow — Good on and for you. Congrats on having the vision to do what you did.
Notoros Official
Shortly after my master’s degree I began working full time in the still nascent industry as a developer, journalist, and product designer. After about half a decade working for start-ups and enterprises I met the other founder of Notoros, Brendan Laiben.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Ok now you’re just showing off.
Notoros Official
Brendan was an even earlier adopter of Bitcoin than I was. By the time I discovered Ethereum he had already been developing smart contracts for some time. He had learned about them while leveraging his skills as an aerospace engineer to optimize airflow on mining rigs at a data centre for an enterprise Bitcoin mining operation. There he learned about smart contracts from some of the original Ethereum devs. He has been a full stack blockchain engineer ever since.
Bilo | Crypto Society
So cool🔥
That is very impressive sir. Congratulations on your success. I love these self-made, self-innovative storylines and I admire this a great deal.
Notoros Official
We’ve both been in the blockchain space for nearly a decade now and have worked at all parts of the technology stack. These days, we both take on many roles both technical and nontechnical, but for the most part I develop the business and community facing parts while Brendan is the technical lead helping to bring our shared vision of Notoros into reality.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Can you tell us about why you thought NOTOROS needed to be built and what problem it solves?
Notoros Official
We had worked as consultants for years and have been full stack blockchain engineers for some time. All of our clients wanted a platform that could do it all. They wanted a platform that was fast, scalable, inexpensive, configurable, with tons of privacy features, etc.
The reality of it was that there was no platform suitable to meet all these needs. Developers of public blockchains seemed so wrapped up in building the incentive structures of their chain that they forgot to build an efficient database. Brendan and I sometimes call this mindset “Bitcoin tunnel-vision”. For years we sorted through existing blockchain technologies to find the one that would least compromise on our client’s goals, but now we have created a solution that fully achieves those goals and much more.
Notoros is more about building the ultimate peer-to-peer database, rather than the ultimate cryptocurrency. Notoros is an immutable peer-to-peer database with all of the powers of a blockchain, and virtually none of its limitations. It adheres to the “ACID” principles expected of traditional databases and all but eliminates the need for specialized blockchain knowledge. We accomplish this by mapping many of the best ideas from the dawn of distributed computing into the modern blockchain space.
With Notoros, developers can build dapps with the speed, efficiency, and simplicity they are used to when leveraging traditional databases. In other words, Dapp developers no longer have to build up years of experience with a particular blockchain, its consensus, or tokenomics model. Instead, dapp developers can build dapps in any programming language or paradigm and know that they can coexist across the same ledger.
This solves a ton of problems that are rampant in the rest of the crypto industry. For example, Notoros does not have front-running or “Miner-Extracted Value” (MEV). All events recorded on the Notoros ledger are ordered fairly.
Notoros also doesn’t suffer from latency associated with “side-chain” and “state-channel” models, and is thus not subject to their security vulnerabilities.
Perhaps most exciting of all is Notoros’ ability to layer independent states together, ensuring that just because there is a dispute in an application, like The DAO, does not mean the entire network needs to fork to remedy it.
This in particular has massive implications for the readiness with which traditional financial institutions can adopt DLT.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Very exciting. A few questions.
1)Please explain immutability
2)How do you avoid front running or MEV?
Notoros Official
1)
When something is immutable it is permanent. Immutable in the context of blockchain and DLT means that this information will be recorded and retained for the remainder of human history so long as there are people out there with a vested interest in maintaining the blockchain…….. so, a very long time
Being recorded immutably doesn’t prevent data from being updated, but does protect the data from ever being removed from the ledger.
Bilo | Crypto Society
+ thanks
Notoros Official
Now that may sound intense, and it is, but immutable data has some distinct advantages over mutable data. With immutable data it is extremely difficult to deny events as they took place.
This removes the opportunity for revisionist history or “societal gaslighting”. With this kind of permanence, rights to free speech, and free assembly can be better protected, and corruption in our financial systems and elsewhere can be sooner rooted out.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Great explanation. Many thanks.
Notoros Official
2)
In most deployments, Notoros utilizes the Cerberus consensus algorithm.
Cerberus uses a mechanism from the early days of distributed computing called Lamport Logical clocks, which can order asynchronous events across a network into a synchronous fashion
Notoros ensures applications retain ordering before messing with application execution.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Ok so no matter how much gas someone who wants to front run uses, it changes nothing. Right?
Notoros Official
Correct, gas is for fairly distributing compute resources for application execution, not for consensus priority.
Bilo | Crypto Society
That’s amazing — so you’ve managed to bring “first come first served” into the mix. That its huge!!!
So I’ve heard of Layer 0, Layer 1 and Layer 2; What is a layer 1.5? And why is NOTOROS classified that way?
Notoros Official
You will often hear us refer to Notoros as being a “layer 1.5” because we had to adjust to the terminology that the crypto community was using.
I would argue that by immediately dubbing the batching solutions as “layer-2s” the industry got ahead of itself and confused the roles of these networks.
Bilo | Crypto Society
That’s so true. I often see many definitions out there.
Notoros Official
Unlike layer-2s, Notoros connects directly to the consensus layer. Unlike layer-1s, it enables the user to define the context of their virtual machine, rather than the network itself.
Notoros does this by providing a standard data encoding that abstracts the difference between the application/VM-layer and consensus-layer of the blockchain, hence “Layer 1.5”.
This standard data encoding allows any virtual machine, dapp, or programming paradigm to coexist across the same ledger. Only that which is absolutely essential to be on-chain is encoded in the Notoros data standard. Everything else is a customizable application execution environment, which is dependent on the needs of its users. In this way, each user on the Notoros network is viewing the same raw data, but through different contextual lenses. This makes it very easy to develop hybrid public/permissioned ledgers.
Understanding this paradigm and the way by which it makes all encoded data equally available is key to understanding the worlds of opportunity provided by Notoros.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Thank you for the great explanation!
Just gonna rewind here a little bit and ask for our audience less familiar with blockchain tech. How would you describe NOTOROS if you were talking to someone unfamiliar with digital assets?
Notoros Official
You might have heard the blockchain/crypto revolution compared to the humble beginning of the internet. Blockchain is a technology all about proving the source of data and the order in which it was received. Notoros is a lot like “HTTP for blockchain”.
To understand what this means let me provide a little bit of background…
In the beginning of the internet there were a series of disconnected communications networks controlled by different institutions.
Some were controlled by university research labs, and others by the US Department of Energy.
These networks all used different message formats, which made it difficult to make them interoperate with one another, like trying to send mail in a country without zip codes.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Like intranets?
Notoros Official
Yes, essentially like intranets, but still spread out over large geographies.
This whole thing changed when Tim Berners-Lee introduced a new messaging protocol called “HyperText Transfer Protocol”, or HTTP. HTTP was revolutionary because it created a universal encoding & decoding data standard that could take any type of information and accurately transmit it to its intended recipient across the internet.
Like an envelope carrying a letter, the content of the message was now completely independent of the way in which the message was delivered.
This new “HTTP” messaging protocol was generalizable and universal, enabling all of the otherwise disparate internet networks to finally cross-communicate.
This ignited a revolution now referred to as the “world wide web” because whether it was an email, video, or JPEG, all data could be easily packaged for the internet.
So how does this relate to Notoros? Well, Notoros provides a similar insight as HTTP.
Bilo | Crypto Society
This is so interesting
Notoros Official
Notoros separates the content of an application from the way it is validated on-chain.
Now, any kind of data or application can be sourced, ordered, and validated on-chain without needing to open the envelope.
In this way, Notoros creates a universal standard for validating information on a blockchain, much in the same way HTTP created a universal standard for transmitting information across the internet.
This is one way of understanding Notoros and its role in the future of the internet.
Bilo | Crypto Society
This is like bridging it all together then? All of it.
Notoros Official
I think it is just that, yes.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Amazing — this is revolutionary. I have to congratulate you again. I know I’ll be doing it more often as we go down my list of questions.
What chain is NOTOROS built on and why did you make that choice?
Notoros Official
Notoros is originally built as an infrastructure layer on the RadixDLT chain, but is consensus agnostic and can operate as its own layer-1.
I discovered Radix five or so years ago after spending a large chunk of my early career hunting for the perfect blockchain system. It was clear this system would need to adhere to “ACID” database standards. It would need to be “sharded” to compensate for network latency in a geographically spread out distributed system.
I was inspired by Radix because it was clear they were attempting to solve many of the problems with consensus algorithms in a holistic way.
Radix illustrated that a system could be both sharded and atomic, which means that the network could scale with the availability of hardware, but not have to redundantly update different sections of the ledger.
Another thing that set Radix apart was the minimalism and elegance of their consensus design, which is a trait we’ve worked to emulate while developing Notoros.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Thank you. Is NOTOROS interoperable and if so on which chains?
Notoros Official
Notoros will not be immediately interoperable with other chains in terms of liquidity bridges or anything like that. It will begin as an isolated network, but will eventually have this kind of interoperability.
I would describe Notoros as INTRA-operable…
Bilo | Crypto Society
Excellent. It seems to be essential to your use case.
Notoros Official
In that it can accept any smart contract or programming paradigm and encode their data across the same ledger.
Because all data in Notoros is highly available, querying and utilizing data across different “universes” with it becomes more feasible than on other networks.
In this way, a hypothetical Ethereum smart contract could be made to call data from a Cardano or Hyperledger smart contracts when they are all running atop of the same Notoros data standard.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Brilliant.
Notoros Official
Unlike side-chain architectures, Notoros queries won’t have to wait for multiple layers of consensus and won’t require the same inter-chain address mappings.
This means the data is far easier to work with, far less expensive to use, and far less subject to hacking or computational errors.
This interoperability will be a little more complex than the liquidity bridges used today, which, for the most part, only transfer token values.
This added complexity will be well worth it, however, because it will open the door to orders of magnitude more sophistication and possibility when it comes to dapp design.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Definitely. A bridge of information and smart contracts. It’s really brilliant
Does Notoros operate on a POW or POS consensus and why?
Notoros Official
Right now Notoros uses Cerberus Consensus, developed by Radix DLT.
Cerberus is an evolution of Hotstuff consensus, which is an evolution of DPoS.
So in essence, our consensus is proof of stake, but the Radix team has also discussed adding a PoW element in the future, which would make for a PoS/PoW hybrid consensus.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Is there a NOTOROS token?
Notoros Official
The Notoros data standard itself does not have a token at this time.
Plugins/virtual machines/applications running on top of Notoros will typically have a utility token that grants holders the proportional ability to use the technology. The decision making around this is still evolving and we will be sharing more on this topic in 2022.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Looking forward to it sir
Tell us a little about each one of your USE CASES:
-SECURITY
-SOURCING
-ENVIRONMENT
-FINANCE
-HEALTHCARE
-INSURANCE
Notoros Official
We really see DLT being pervasive throughout every industry and especially as a means to connect otherwise disconnected industries.
For example, physical & digital security are only as trustworthy as the technologist who implements them.
So, essentially, all companies are vulnerable to malicious behaviour by their system administrators.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Reminder for our audience. DLT = Distributed Ledger Technology (decentralized database).
Notoros Official
With mulitsig protocols and decentralized databases, we can create organizations resilient to their individual members.
When it comes to sourcing you have probably heard there are a lot of applications for supply chains + blockchain.
Notoros Official
One example is using NFTs, not as trackers for ownership of digital art, but of physical objects.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Yes — as registered right of ownership.
Notoros Official
Imagine I manufacture something like a battery. and I sell it to companies all over the world but then, years later I find out one batch was faulty and a major fire hazard.
So, I have to issue a recall and then goes through years-long processes of figuring out which items on shelves have these dangerous batteries in them.
It could cost years and billions of dollars, not to mention become unsafe and damage reputations.
But by tracking these items as individuals we can remove them from store shelves with surgical precision.
Environment? where to begin!
We can use DLT to trade energy and carbon credits with far more accountability or use it to ensure conservation organizations are maximizing their resources.
Bilo | Crypto Society
(EWT partnership coming? 👀🤫)
Finance?
Defi. Defi as we know it is just the beginning to an entirely transcendental economy from what we have now. Keep an eye out for more content from me on the direction of defi.
Healthcare? We can use cryptographic technologies to use patient data without violating medical privacy. This will eventually enable us to perform real-time clinical trials on all patients taking a medication, to make better meds without harming anyone’s safety or privacy.
This belongs in an emerging area of computing called “multiparty computing” which Notoros is well-suited to facilitate.
Insurance?
Insurance is perhaps the most important application of blockchain.
our economy is increasingly about making smart decisions that mitigate risk increasing the capital & time efficiency of that through DLT will unlock a vastly more stable and productive economy.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Thanks for taking us through all these use cases. Really interesting and seems there are endless more possibilities.
Notoros Official
Yes, especially when bridging between domains.
Bilo | Crypto Society
What are you currently working on and can you describe your future roadmap?
Notoros Official
We are working on the imminent release of our betanet, which will begin as a network with few nodes hosted by the Notoros team. It will come with a dapp which acts as a dashboard for developing and experimenting with Notoros dapps.
As we gather feedback from early adopters, we will add features to improve the developer experience even more.
After this period we will be releasing compatible virtual machines, like our full sharded EVM module known as “ETH^” or “Ethereum Prime”.
These will be followed by others like Linux, RenVM and more. Eventually we will do a controlled roll out of the components necessary for a fully decentralized network.
Once fully decentralized, users can expect, (and help develop), liquidity bridges to other ecosystems and applications, as well as oracles to bring in loads of real-time, real-world data.
We intend on Notoros being used as the underlying infrastructure of the future economy, which is why so far we have been focusing on enterprise and industrial-scale applications.
From energy, to medicine, critical supply chain infrastructure, and more, we are motivated to bring the complex industries into blockchain and help merge them with the crypto economy that exists today, for a network of collaboration unlike any we have seen before.
Bilo | Crypto Society
How does someone tech-savvy following this AMA become an early adopter / tester ? Is this possible?
Notoros Official
Keep an eye on our social channels (Twitter, Linkedin, Reddit, and soon Telegram) for the release of our Beta net in December. More instructions will follow from there.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Could you please provide us with some challenges NOTOROS has faced but overcome?
Notoros Official
Notoros currently relies on the Cerberus consensus algorithm developed by RadixDLT. We are still a small team and it’s can difficult to keep up with the changes to the Radix codebase.
It can also be difficult to communicate the full scope of what Notoros is capable of because it is such a fundamental departure from how the blockchain industry works today,
Most of our obstacles are the standard growing pains of any start-up. Some challenges are, however, unique to Notoros and what it means to try to disrupt an industry that is itself disruptive, and still so poorly understood by the general public who will come to use it.
Bilo | Crypto Society
You are doing a fantastic job explaining it here 🙂
Notoros Official
Lots of practice
Bilo | Crypto Society
With quality AMA’s like this. More people will understand and this will help 😉
Can you please give an overview of your governance protocol, and how it works?
Notoros Official
The very first betanet will be closed-source and hosted by the Notoros team. It will be leveraging an Cerberus consensus and will remain somewhat centralized while we complete the legal and technical duties of our unique technology and the corresponding decentralization rollout.
That being said…..In the future, you can expect a multiverse of token economies and governance models to emerge on Notoros.
Bilo | Crypto Society
Excellent. Thank you
Notoros Official
One of the most exciting elements of the Notoros architecture is that it decouples the consensus around validating state on the ledger from the consensus of validating virtual machine.
This means that virtually any governance or tokenomics system can be made to work within Notoros. Eventually users will be able to use this to A/B test their governance models against each other and find more optimal ways of organizing people.
It’s kind of like a gym for game theory models, where good governance can be evolved out of simpler models. In it, each virtual machine or application will have a consortium of nodes to prove state and welcome new members.
This topic is complex and I will be elucidating more in future Notoros content.
Bilo | Crypto Society
I can see that but also see how versatile your platform will be in allowing for this flexibility to take place.
What other players in the blockchain world have you partnered with? or in progress if you are at liberty to discuss.
Notoros Official
We have partnered with the Radix team as well as the team from Storj.io. There are other organizations in adjacent industries we are working with, but cannot yet disclose.
We feel the Radix team is developing an exceptional consensus mechanism, and while Notoros is technically consensus agnostic, we feel it thrives using their Cerberus consensus, from multiple technical perspectives.
We are also partnered with Storj.io. We have been following their project since the early days of crypto.
It has always been clear the Storj team understands the direction the crypto industry is trying to tackle one of the biggest and most necessary challenges in the space. I think the team over there is full of really smart people and I admire the work they are doing when it comes to the governance and cryptography of their data-sharding technology.
Bilo | Crypto Society
If there was one thing you could hope to see NOTOROS achieve next year, what would it be?
Notoros Official
After the Betanet we will take the feedback we get from users to improve our tech stack before the launch of our public mainnet in 2022.
I am looking forward to the adoption of existing dapps, new dapps, and dapps that could not succeed under the price barriers of current layer-1 networks.
Most of all, I’m excited to see how developers take advantage of Notoros’ unique architecture to build state-layering dapps that were never before possible. This would demonstrate that building on blockchain doesn’t have to be difficult in order to have a colossal impact.
Bilo | Crypto Society
I have zero doubt that they will be lining up around the block. You truly have something very unique and revolutionary here.
Andrew, do you wish to let us know anything else that was not covered in the questions above?
Notoros Official
Hmmmm
Mostly that I am excited we are so close to showing what we have been working on for so long.
It is quite a leap from blockchain as we know it, so I hope our developer community takes the time to understand how this new architecture can benefit them and ask themselves “What kind of dapp would I build if there were no limits anymore?”
The best thing Notoros fans can do is follow us on social media to stay up to date and to come get to know the rest of the Notoros community.
We are still small, but growing quite quickly
L B | Crypto Society
https://twitter.com/notorosdlt?s=21
Julius
Which use cases in the health industry besides Patient Data do you have in mind?
Notoros Official
Well tracking pharmaceuticals is a pretty important one. There are many counterfeit medicines out there.
I am also excited to see more collaboration between hospitals using DLT, like an emergency notification system when a new geographically-bound virus or contamination emerges.
puzzle123
Thanks for the informative AMA.
The project Looks really amazing, many good thoughts from you Notoros Official.
How close are you working together with the Radix Devs?
Notoros Official
We communicate with the Radix team relatively often. It depends on what’s going on because when everyone’s super busy so we don’t always get to have long meetings.
Burak Ayyildiz
W did you choose the cerberus consensus ? And will anything change, when radix expose a hybrid consensus in their eco-system?
Notoros Official
Cerberus is very minimalistic and understands that global time/ordering fundamentally bottlenecks the capabilities of the blockchain.
In an unsharded system, a guy in Korea buying dinner has to wait for the validation of a transaction sent by a guy in the USA buying breakfast.
These systems need to be able to parallelize operations happening at wildly different geographies in wildly different contexts.
Radix sharding makes sense, requires less overhead than most, and scales horizontally
CryptoTech
The enterprise benefits of using DLT first are ous, there is a reason Quant says they are “Enabling Enterprise Adoption”. It’s because for the first time ever, any company can use DLT easily, with just a single API & 10 minutes of setup.
Notoros Official
I’m sure they will accomplish their goal in some regard, but I don’t think this has many degrees of freedom as Notoros.
José Ramón Sánchez
As you will be using Radix’s Cerberus, does that means that we need their XRD native token to use Notoros?
Notoros Official
Shortly after integration approval by the Radix team Notoros will be deployed to a Radix network where XRD will be required to use it.
Julius
Notoros Official Do you have already apps that will start programming on Notoros? Or is this a step to early? 😉
Notoros Official
We have already piloted this technology in the Energy, Defense, and Medical sectors.
There are more dapps being developed on Notoros now.
Notoros Official
Thanks so much for hosting Crypto Society! I really loved all the great questions
We look forward to getting to know this community and we hope to see you on our social channels!
https://twitter.com/NotorosDLT
https://www.linkedin.com/company/notorosdlt
Notoros.reddit.com
Jumping off here — Talk to you all soon!
Bilo | Crypto Society
Thank you for your time in answering our questions here today. We are all very appreciative of your time and of the answers you have provided.
👉Relevant Links
⚜️ Notoros Website: https://www.notoros.io/
⚜️ Notoros Telegram: https://t.me/NotorosDLT
⚜️ Notors Twitter: https://twitter.com/notorosdlt
⚜️ Crypto Society Chat: https://t.me/cryptosocietyy
⚜️ Crypto Society Announcements: https://t.me/CryptoSocietyyy
⚜️ Crypto Society Twitter : https://twitter.com/
