Synereo

History

Synereo was founded in 2014 by Dor Konforty, Anderson McCutcheon, Yuval Adam, and Greg Meredith. They began re-designing a social media platform, which would give more power to individual users, as they saw that current mainstream social networks were profiting from users through advertising and selling private information. Konforty announced Synereo November 2014 in The Israel Bitcoin Conference.

The initial plan was to host the Synereo social network in an already existing blockchain, but at the time there did not exist any blockchain technologies that could support the service. The Synereo Tech-Stack, first developed to host the social network, is now designed to be able to host other decentralized applications and also provide decentralized storage. This design was described in the whitepaper, released in March 2015.

The amount of AMP tokens in existence was initially locked to two billion (2,000,000,000). Synereo is funded through AMP crowdsales, either by fundraising campaigns or selling AMPs privately to investors. From the entire collection of AMPs 61% were set aside for funding purposes. The first crowdsale was held March 2015, during which about 45 million AMPs were sold. The remaining 320 million AMPs that were left unsold from the crowdsale were burned. Synereo also has burned AMPs in other events, including 50% of all existing AMPs in September 2016.

Synereo has during its history teamed up with different collaboration partners. May 2015 partnership with LivelyGig was announced to build a decentralized application (DApp) for the platform. July 2015 cooperation with Ethereum started to develop proof-of-stake protocol called Casper. In September 2016, NFX Guild announced that they would be selecting teams for building DApps using the Synereo tech-stack.

Technology

Synereo’s 2.0 software plans to incorporate all faculties needed to support decentralized computation without central servers. This includes a technology named RChain – a blockchain-based implementation of the execution of computational operations; Special-K, a storage and content delivery layer for the hosting of various forms of data; and Rholang, a smart contracting language, specifically designed for the parallel execution of processes.

With Synereo’s planned technology, the role traditionally assigned to server farms is broken up and distributed among ordinary users of the network, which on their part are being compensated for their contributions of storage and computational abilities. Accordingly, once implemented, the Synereo platform will be, in essence, a giant, global computer, composed of a multitude of personal devices, working together to maintain the network, execute decentralized applications, and host data.

RChain

RChain is a turing-complete blockchain, based on Proof-of-Stake consensus. In contrast to preceding blockchain designs, computation in RChain blockchain is designed to be concurrent and sharded, allowing the parallel execution of processes and concurrent computation. “Sharded” refers to the subdivision of the blockchain into composable parts, which interlock to a unified whole, but do not need to be computed all at once (as it is the case with the classical blockchain). “Concurrent” means that this subdivision enables different processes to run in parallel without interfering with each other.

Consensus

RChain’s consensus protocol is based on the ‘Casper’ Proof-of-Stake design, developed by Synereo’s CTO, Greg Meredith, in cooperation with many of the key players in the blockchain space. The Casper consensus protocols ensure that nodes reach agreement about the contracts, contract state, and transactions for which each node is interested.

Validators are bonded with a stake, which is a security deposit placed into a smart contract, to bet on the transaction blocks most likely to be validated. The most likely blocks to be validated are those adhering to algorithmic structures. The model is recursive in that the status of contracts is derived by looking at which blocks people bet on the most. Therefore, each validator’s incentive is to bet in the way that they expect others to bet in the future, driving the process toward convergence or verification.

Transaction rewards are given to incentivize agents to participate in the validation process. If a validator attempts to validate any blocks that the protocol considers “invalid”, alluding to an attempt at manipulation, then the validator’s deposit is forfeited along with the privilege of further participating in the consensus process.

In contrast to Ethereum’s Casper, RChain nodes do not propose and verify blocks, but whole sets of blocks, or logical propositions, that are described by properties they communicate to each other during the consensus resolution phase of the protocol. A proposition is a set of statements which describe the state of the blockchain. For example: which transactions must be included, in which order, which transactions should not be included etc. When validators come to consensus, they come to consensus on a maximally consistent subset of properties, or the largest set of blocks they all agree is valid.

This design requires concurrent processing, which RChain achieves by implementing Rho mobile process calculus. Mobile process calculi allow block process components to be sharded, allocated to available nodes, processed, and then retrieved from those nodes to assemble fully validated transaction blocks.

In this non-linear design, consensus can be reached for an enormous number of transactions at a one time. Ultimately, transaction rates are dramatically increased, while confirmation times are dramatically decreased.

Special-K

Special-K is Synereo’s Storage and Content Delivery layer built on top of Synereos Blockchain 2.0 infrastructure. While the Blockchain records the overall state of the system, it is not suited for the storage of heavy media data such as images, videos and text. For this purpose, Synereo’s Greg Meredith developed a unique protocol to distribute this kind of information among Synereo nodes and then retrieve it on demand.

Special-K has been under active development for over five years and constitutes an approach of distributed storage technology, representing an evolution of DHT-like distributed key-value databases. Special-K also provides a monadic domain-specific language, providing programmers with an unified API where they can access data distributed across the network. Data is distributed with both redundancy and sensitivity in mind, making sure it’s available where it’s needed, when it’s needed, and concealed when it’s not.

Rholang

Rholang stands for Reflective, Higher-Order process Language, and is RChain’s native smart-contract language; the equivalent of Ethereum’s Solidity. In contrast to Solidity, however, Rholang is a reflective programming language, based on process calculus, allowing for the parallel execution of processes and the composition of higher-ordered smart contracts on the basis of lower ones.

The design to use reflection is chosen because it grants Rholang an obvious advantage over traditional smart contract languages and Blockchain scripts, and puts it in the same category with established programming languages. Java, C#, and Scala, have all adopted reflection as a core feature. This is what allows programmers to use programs to write other programs, on which more complex applications can be deployed. Without this feature, industrial scale development would likely be impossible due to complexity.

The architecture based on formal mathematical semantics also allows for better safety tests and simulations based on formal verification, a property of utmost importance when it comes to publicly used decentralized applications. The infamous DAO hack for example could have been avoided if the DAO’s code had been based on Rholang.

Social layer

Synereo’s social layer provides assets like digital identity, socially generated reputation and networks of influence to all other application built on top of it – allowing for decentralized economy to function without intermediaries and trusted third parties. Synereo’s social Layer adheres to the principles of the Attention Economy approach, treating human attention as a scarce commodity, and applying economic theory to solve various information management problems. The algorithmic principles, governing this content promotion and distribution scheme, are loosely modeled after information dispersion flows in the human brain, allowing for an attention economic approach to arise organically.

AMP

AMP is a currency with a limited supply in the network that has monetary value. AMP is Synereo’s native crypto currency, incentivising several economic behaviours, necessary for the platforms operation:

AMPs can be acquired by purchasing them, by contributing to specific content in the network or by providing storage bandwidth and computing power by running a node in the network. The main use of AMPs in the network is amplifying content. This means that a user can attach some amount of AMPs to their content, which makes it more visible to other users. Every time user receives amplified content, they get a portion of the attached AMPs as a reward.

REO

REO is not a tradable currency, like AMP is, but a score that is meant to reflect the users reputation in the community. It affects how much a certain user's posts reach their community and how much they are compensated for viewing amplified content. REO is calculated from engagement, which is a measure of how much attention one user has been giving to another user's content. Attention is measured from actions such as liking or commenting content.Engagement is calculated so that attention between the same users impacts the measurement less and less with each action. "This is intended to lower the impact of repeated responses such as liking every post, normalizing the effect this indication of provided attention has on the measure of engagement. i.e. if someone is statistically likely to engage a given post, the effect on engagement score is reduced as it is less meaningful as an indicator of provided attention." REO also decays to a neutral point over time.