Fuel Network, a modular solution with a fundraising target of $80 million in 2022, has released its Beta-5 testnet and plans to launch its mainnet in the third quarter of this year. What enables Fuel Network to address the current limitations in transaction performance and state bloat?
Table of Contents
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Introduction to Fuel Network
Modular Execution Layer
Technical Architecture of Fuel Network
Problems Solved by Fuel Network
Low Computational Performance: Parallel Computing
State Bloat: State Minimization
Enhanced Interoperability: Introspection
Development Status of Fuel Network
Team: Overlap with Celestia Core Members
Capital: $80 Million Fundraising
Marketing: Market Ecosystem Still Undeveloped
Unconventional Execution Layer Network
Introduction to Fuel Network
Fuel Network is a decentralized Layer2 network based on Optimistic Rollup that focuses on the execution layer for processing transaction computations in modular blockchains. Its concept is to have more bandwidth and computational capacity while using fewer resources. Fuel Network aims to optimize the computational capacity of existing decentralized networks by addressing three major aspects: parallel computing, state minimization, and interoperability.
Unlike mainstream Rollups such as Arbitrum, the execution layer provided by Fuel Network is not simply a replication of existing architectures. Instead, it offers more efficient computational capabilities through innovative virtual machines, programming languages, and developer tools.
The technology stack of Fuel Network can be primarily divided into three parts:
FuelVM:
It uses the UTXO model for state access and allows full nodes to identify the accounts involved in transactions and map the dependency relationships before execution. This enables Fuel to utilize more CPU threads for execution. The core functionalities of Fuel, including parallel computing, state minimization, and enhanced interoperability, are all derived from the innovative design of the FuelVM virtual machine.
Sway:
It is a programming language designed specifically for blockchain environments, combining the strengths of Solidity and Rust to facilitate easy development using these languages.
Forc Toolchain:
It provides developers with tools for easy development and deployment of dApps on the Fuel chain. It allows customization and extension of functionalities to meet the diverse needs of developers.
The Ethereum ecosystem is currently experiencing a period of explosive growth in modular L2 chains. Although Ethereum has made significant advancements in performance and functionality through Rollups, it still lags behind other competing chains in terms of computational capacity.
By utilizing FuelVM, Fuel Network aims to enhance the three major computational performance aspects of existing Rollups:
Parallel Computing: For performance improvement.
Fuel Network satisfies the growing demand for transaction bandwidth by executing transactions in parallel across multiple processors, eliminating the need to wait for the execution of other transaction blocks.
State Minimization: For sustainability.
Fuel Network’s design based on the UTXO model minimizes the growth of state during transaction execution, reducing the hardware burden on nodes and enhancing the long-term decentralized development.
Enhanced Composability: For ecosystem development.
Fuel Network achieves block-level composability through its special smart contract introspection mechanism, thereby enhancing the overall network security and cross-network interoperability.
The focus will now shift to discussing the unique virtual machine, FuelVM, and the three major innovations and advantages it brings.
The traditional EVM can only execute one transaction at a time, while the remaining transactions have to wait in a queue, resulting in inefficiency. Parallel computing allows multiple transactions to be executed across multiple processors, avoiding delays in transaction confirmation without waiting for the execution of other transaction blocks.
Recommended reading:
Introduction to Layer1: Understanding the Highlights of Sei Network v2 in Plain Language
Reason for recommendation: Although the operating principles are different, reading this article can help understand the parallel computing of blockchain virtual machines in a more value-oriented manner.
FuelVM implements the improvements proposed by developers for the EVM over the years, which have been difficult to implement due to the need for compatibility.
By using the strictly state-accessible UTXO model in FuelVM and managing the hardware through FuelVM, all nodes can identify the accounts involved in transactions and map the dependency relationships before execution. This allows Fuel to utilize more CPU resources, which are usually idle in single-threaded blockchains. As a result, Fuel can provide more computational power, state access, and transaction throughput than single-threaded blockchains.
State refers to the “latest account information of a decentralized network,” including all account data and token distributions in the network. Traditionally, state data needs to be accessed extensively on disks to enable quick access by nodes and is the slowest processing process in transactions, apart from signatures and hashing. Storing state is a significant cost and a development obstacle to network performance.
State, unlike historical data that can be discarded or expired (account data for each address cannot be discarded), continues to expand in size as the network’s usage duration increases, becoming a hidden concern for future network performance.
Recommended reading:
Why is State Bloat the Ultimate Boss of Blockchain Scalability Development?
Reason for recommendation: This article describes the current state bloat situation and challenges as described by the founder of Fuel Network. It provides a clearer understanding of the unique value proposition of Fuel Network’s solution and serves as a prelude to this article.
To address the above issues, Fuel Network provides native state rehydration functionality through the design of FuelVM. Developers on FuelVM can use the dehydrate function to handle state, dehydrating it when not needed, and rehydrating it when the state is required, restoring it to an immediately accessible form and reducing the overall state size.
Unlike Ethereum and other traditional approaches that require constant access to the network’s entire state, Fuel Network increases the efficiency of accessing state resources by compressing and deactivating the state, thereby maximizing the utilization of state access resources.
Additionally, Fuel Network provides other designs to minimize state growth for developers when developing smart contracts:
Scripts:
Scripts, similar to smart contracts, possess computational logic and can be stored in transactions instead of the state, reducing the state size. Additionally, scripts can be executed by transactions, calling zero or multiple smart contracts.
Predicates:
Predicates are lightweight, stateless smart contracts responsible for pure transaction authorization mechanisms. Predicates can only access historical transaction data and cannot access the latest state of the chain.
The architecture of Fuel Network aims to integrate all these functionalities to achieve minimal state execution, ensuring that the performance of long-term network development is not hindered by state.
In the blockchain industry, introspection refers to the ability of smart contracts to inspect, analyze, and understand their own properties as well as the blockchain state. This allows smart contracts to make automatic decisions based on the current transactions, state, other contracts, and their own execution results.
Introspection is a powerful feature that enables more complex, dynamic, and responsive applications on the blockchain. It allows contracts to adjust their behavior based on network conditions, enhancing the efficiency of cross-chain functionality and decentralized applications (dApps).
Furthermore, Fuel Network offers innovative transaction models, such as allowing multiple input variables when triggering a contract and even accepting predicates, maximizing the utility and composability potential of contracts.
Fuel Network provides greater flexibility in the structure of transactions’ inputs and outputs.
(Source)
The team officially launched the Beta-5 testnet on the 1st of this month and expects to launch the mainnet in the third quarter of this year.
Fuel Network is closely related to Celestia, as they both emphasize modular design, and John Adler is a co-founder of both projects, resulting in some overlap in the core team.
The two projects complement each other in different aspects while operating in the same field. Celestia focuses on the data availability layer, while Fuel Network enhances the performance of the execution layer. It is expected that there may be more collaborations between the two projects in the future, as evident from their whitepaper.
Fuel Network, which emphasizes execution layer performance, is not continuously optimizing existing architectures but rather designing innovative virtual machines, parallel processing mechanisms, and state minimization through different means to achieve higher computational efficiency. It indeed has certain advantages.
However, it is also important to note that performance improvement has gradually become a saturated market in the blockchain field. Various Rollups, competing chains, and even non-blockchain stateless infrastructures are constantly optimizing to provide the most efficient computational space. As a network focusing on “computation,” Fuel Network faces significant challenges in establishing a dominant position.
(Arweave introduces decentralized computing network ao to create innovative smart contract execution environments)
Celestia
Fuel Network
Rollups
Modularization
Further reading:
What Technological Innovations Does zkSync Have? How Does It Have the Potential to Impact the Existing Rollup Ecosystem?
Viewpoint: Why Did Starknet Airdrop Scale to Millions of Wallets? And Why Now?