Seele is an interesting blockchain project, but their whitepaper is highly technical. I created this multi-part series, as I believe that Seele could benefit from a clearer and easier to understand overview of their innovative blockchain technology. In each article I will provide an in-depth explanation of one of Seele’s innovative features and try to explain this feature in a way that it is easy to understand, even for someone with a non-technical background. In part 1, I will be explaining Seele’s Neural Consensus Algorithm. Part 2, will be about Seele’s Heterogeneous Forest Network architecture. Part 3, will be about Seele’s Value Transport Protocol and in part 4, I will elaborate on how Seele incorporates their Quick Value Internet Connection.
✅ Seele in a nutshell
Seele positions itself as a blockchain 4.0. Their aim is to improve on Bitcoin (blockchain 1.0), Ethereum (blockchain 2.0) and EOS/Dfinity/Cosmos (blockchain 3.0). All previous blockchain generations suffer from the Scalability, Security and Efficiency paradox; meaning that it is difficult, if not impossible, to optimize one or two of these pillars, without comprising the other one. For instance, EOS has to potential to scale up to 1 million transactions per second; but in order to achieve such a high throughput the agent nodes may become susceptible to attacks; hence compromising on security.
Seele is trying to improve upon existing blockchains by building a new network infrastructure from the ground up without compromising on this scalability, efficiency and security paradox. To accomplish this, Seele strives to implement the following features:
➡️ Neural Consensus Algorithm
➡️ Heterogeneous Forest Network architecture
➡️ Value Transport Protocol
➡️ Quick Value Internet Connection
✅ Quick Value Internet Connection
One of the characteristics of a blockchain and accompanied consensus algorithms, is that the various nodes are located across the world. As a result, these nodes form a complex network that can encounter some serious network jitter and latency, negatively impacting a blockchain’s performance. The current generation blockchains (e.g. Bitcoin and Ethereum) make use of the traditional internet TCP and UDP protocols to transfer data. However, to better accommodate the various needs that blockchain networks require at the transport and application layers and to reduce the jitter and latency on the network, Seele proposes the Quick Value Internet Connection protocol. To explain what this Quick Value Internet Connection protocol entails, I will first explain the traditional internet protocols TCP and UDP.
TCP, stands for Transmission Control Protocol. This sounds difficult, but it is actually pretty easy to understand. Using the TCP protocol, the computer that is sending the data connects directly to the computer that is the intended receiver of the data and stays connected for the whole duration of the transfer. An easy to understand real-life analogy would be picking up the phone to call a friend. You transfer information (e.g. the conversion you are having) and when it is over, you both hang up and the connection is terminated. Making use of a TCP protocol allows for a quick and reliable transfer of data, but also puts a high load on the connection as the connection and transfer of data has to be monitored constantly.
UDP, stands for User Datagram Protocol. Using the UDP protocol, a computer wraps the data into a nice little package and sends it into the network, which is then in charge of getting the package to the intended receiver. In other words, with UDP the sending computer does not connect directly with the receiving computer, as is done with TCP. Instead it relies on the devices in between the sending and the receiving computer to get the package/data to the right place. The UDP protocol can be best compared to the way how we would send a package in real life. You place your package in the mailbox and hope the postal service will deliver it to the correct location. Most of the time it works out nicely, but sometimes the package may become lost in the process. As you can see, the UDP protocol does not guarantee that the data will reach the correct destination. However, unlike with TCP, there is no need to establish a connection between sender and receiver for the duration of the transfer, reducing the load considerably.
The above information came from the following source.
✅ Unfortunately, Seele’s whitepaper is extremely unclear about the technology underlying their Quick Value Internet Connection (QVIC) protocol. Also, in their telegram they could not provide a clear answer other than vague general answers. Hence for me it is still a mystery how they will implement this QVIC protocol. The only information provided in the whitepaper are the technological advantages that QVIC would bring; which are as follows:
➡️ Using a non-transparent proxy mode, the client connects to the server nearby and is taken over by QVIC.
➡️ Data from the source to the destination to ensure safety without cache.
➡️ Encode data streams, transfer server-to-server data over UDP packets and increase security.
➡️ Load balancing can be used to improve robustness.
➡️ High tolerance for packet loss.
What I make of this is that the objective of Seele’s QVIC is to reduce the packet loss, network jitter and transmission instability when sending data between the different nodes in the network. In order to so, the QVIC protocol strives to combine the speed and efficiency of the UDP protocol with the integrity and reliability of the TCP protocol.
✅According to Seele’s whitepaper using the QVIC protocol, under experimental conditions, the transmission rate of 1G file was increased from 100Kbps to 1Mbps and the confirmation time of a single transaction was reduced by 70%. Also, the QVIC protocol greatly improved the transmission rate compared to the TCP protocol, with the speedup ratio reaching 500% for 1GB data transmission (see image below). For this experiment 50 machines were used from different data centres located around the world (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and London).
In the picture above you notice the comparision of the transmission rate.
On telegram a person named Dima Chizhevsky raised some valid points regarding Seele’s QVIC protocol which I will quote: ”TCP was enhanced several times, and there are many solid organisations in the world that would be interested in its enhancement, but now it seems that TCP has achieved its upper boundary in efficiency improvements, and further optimisations are possible on the data link layer (is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model terms), or on the session and upper layers (caches, chunking, OS tuning, etc.)
And now there is the new QVIC, that declares 500% improvement in the way of reliable information transfer. In case if this is true - it is a big revolution in data transfer, so the interest is obvious.” Unfortunately, these points was apparently forwarded to the developers but were never followed upon in Seele’s telegram group.
So, to conclude: my take on this is that Seele’s QVIC protocol is still very vague and they make a big claim regarding its improvement over the more established TCP and UDP protocols. However, if Seele can pull this off and can really build their Quick Value Internet Connection protocol with the improvements in performance and reliability that they claim, then this can be a gamechanger and we will be hearing a lot more of Seele’s blockchain in the future. Only time will tell but Seele’s progress should be interesting to follow nonetheless.
I hope this article provided a better picture about Seele’s Quick Value Internet Connection protocol. If you have questions about Seele’s Quick Value Internet Connection protocol or Seele’s other technical features, you can always send me a message.
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