Callisto Network Vision
Last updated
Last updated
This article describes the ideology of the Callisto Network project and its successful aspects, experience, and further goals.
Callisto Network was designed, funded, and launched as a sub-project of Ethereum Commonwealth with the initial goal of researching experimental improvements of Ethereum protocol that could be proposed to ETC afterward.
In the past years, we did everything that we originally planned. Anyone can find the links below to my proposals submitted to ETC for the experimental improvements we originally announced as a goal of the Callisto Network launch.
All the experimental improvements to the Ethereum protocol that we’ve made were proposed to ETC and got rejected by ETC moderators. As a result, we decided that the original goals of the Callisto Network project were achieved, and we needed to pick a new development direction.
The project's main goal was to enhance the security of the crypto industry. We witnessed TheDAO hack with all the consequences. We witnessed numerous other hacks. We all agree that this hurts adopting the "better financial system" and should never happen again.
The main goal of Callisto was to develop a solution to this problem or at least improve the situation. We started a Security Department that was third-party auditing projects for free. Then we promoted security practices used by our security department and offered other projects to use the Treasury + Security DAO structure to allocate a portion of their emission to improve ecosystem security.
This was not enough, however — as we can observe, the adoption of the security improvement model is very low. The Security Department of Callisto proves to be efficient enough.
It was originally intended to be turned into a DAO that could operate autonomously. We faced a number of issues that prevented us from implementing the original idea of Security DAO, and therefore we didn't achieve this goal until now.
Based on the experience of the Security Department of Callisto in the past years, I decided to give up the idea of placing the burden of responsibility for the improvement of the security of DAPP ecosystems on Sec. Dep solely. As the paradigm of security engineers says, "Nothing can be perfectly secure, but you can introduce multiple layers of security to overcome the consequences of a breach." It was decided to develop an Insurance Department that would operate on top of the Security Auditing Department and therefore create an additional level of security.
Insurance Department is a promising feature that can be developed and promoted by Callisto Network, but it still needs to be implemented.
While Security Department did not solve the issue of smart-contract hacks and did not become a reference prototype of “DAO that can solve the problem of hacks,” — it still contributed to the security of smart contracts, mainly on the Ethereum chain. We performed over 400 security audits, the highest amount in the industry.
Not even a single security auditing company has the same number of smart contracts audited.
Cold Staking proves to be one of the most successful features of Callisto Network so far. It has evolved significantly since its first iteration. Cold Staking idea is based on gym markets theory. This theory states that mechanisms that force people to lock their coins for a significant period in exchange for % reward are a net beneficial financial tool for the whole ecosystem. This principle is proven to be working perfectly.
Cold Staking code is used as a base for newer implementations. For example, SOY Staking is based on Cold Staking mechanisms.
Any ERC223 token can be made stakeable with almost the same code.
Several side projects are using similar approaches nowadays, and some are using the same code that Callisto introduced first.
Callisto Network governance model was never implemented. Until now, we stayed with the initial “temporary” model with a manually controlled Treasury account.
Well, what we proved correct is that having Treasury is far better than not having Treasury. From the very beginning, we were using Treasury to compensate for the results of multiple on-chain accidents (for example, 2miners pool split that occurred right after the network launch). Many users got refunded, and many issues were easily prevented simply because we followed this practice.
We were documenting transactions on-chain from the very beginning.
Initially, we had the old financial report in a Google spreadsheet.
Later it was upgraded to a GDPR-compatible version.
Finally, we ended up documenting transactions on-chain. Every transaction from Treasury address has hex-encoded data that represents the description of the transaction.
Financial transparency is essential for an open project such as Callisto Network.
Earlier, we had EthereumCommonwealth/Proposals system in place. The original idea was to allow the community to propose ideas and get funding for the implementation.
The idea evolved into the "We fund you" program. For comparison, EOS Network Foundation runs a similar program as well. This practice has become trending in the crypto industry as it attracts new users and helps sustain the ecosystem's growth.
This is a successful aspect of the project, and this practice must continue.
NFTs were trending in crypto during the past year, and we already have several NFT projects on the Callisto Network chain. We are using the CallistoNFT standard, and it brings significant advantages to the ecosystem by allowing users to (1) use their NFTs to record their data and (2) trade NFTs p2p bypassing marketplaces.
We must develop and improve the NFT ecosystem in the future as the adoption is harmed by the lack of explorers, NFT-supporting wallets, and a lot of peripheral services.
Artefin, Czech-based art gallery
TheRepublik, content infrastructure for virtual worlds
VIP Warz, NFT game developed by a community member
PowerCar, NFT game developed by a community member
The Crosschain bridge is another successful aspect of the project. Interblockchain communications are the industry's future, so we are taking a step in the right direction.
However, the bridges are not autonomous and semi-centralized. It would be better to improve the implementation.
Introduce an abstracted bridge system that would allow for the implementation of non-EVM bridges
Improve decentralization
Improve automatization of the bridges
Research the possibility of bridge monetization and possibly provide Bridge-as-a-Service features to multiple side projects
Recently, we have been looking into ways to improve our POW consensus. This is still in the “research” stage. Read more here.
Here you can find a currently investigated paper.
We want to improve the TPS metric and strengthen our position as an ASIC-resistant project. We are investigating the following possible upgrades to achieve this:
POW-POS hybrid consensus implementation
Consensus layer masternodes implementation
POW upgrade
Here you can find the POW upgrade vision description.
The new conception introduces three types of blocks:
Voting blocks
Proposing blocks
Transaction blocks
Transaction blocks currently hold transactions like standard blocks on the Callisto Network chain. Proposer blocks should contain references to transaction blocks. Voter blocks contain the information needed to organize proposer blocks in the chain.
The increase in throughput can be achieved by packing transaction blocks into consensus-related blocks and separating the process of recording transactions to the network from block validation.
At the moment, we have a well-built community within Callisto Network. Some had followed us since the very beginning of the project when it was first announced within the ETC community. The developer's community within Callisto is relatively small. However, we offer many services that benefit smart-contract developers and their communities.
Our further goal is to improve our exposure within multiple smart-contract development communities and among DAPP developers.
For a long time, Callisto has been mainly traded at Bitfinex exchange. One of our primary goals is to increase the number of exchanges where CLO and its tokens are traded.
