A Glimpse into Ternoa

Dear Community,

As someone deeply involved in the tech innovation industry, I understand the importance of constant evolution. It’s crucial for us to know exactly where we stand in the blockchain ecosystem. At Ternoa, our journey has been marked by significant milestones and challenges. Our commitment to pioneering advanced blockchain solutions remains steadfast, and I am excited to share our progress, strengths, and the path we are forging for the future.

Introspection: The Past and the Present

What is Ternoa?

Let’s start with a quick reminder. As of today, Ternoa operates three key networks: a Substrate L1, a L2 zkEVM, and a TEE Co-processor network.

Substrate L1 Chain: A fully operational, decentralized network where WASM apps have been, and are currently being developed. We built this blockchain using Substrate, with the initial ambition to become a parachain and bring our tech stack to Polkadot chains. Substrate turned out to be an incredible, resilient, and powerful blockchain framework. One of a kind, with technical and architectural choices made by Parity teams years ahead of the competition.

However, like many “multi chains” stacks launched as new frameworks in 2021, Polkadot faced struggles attracting app builders. Polkadot is for sure one of the most vibrant infrastructure builders ecosystem. But app activity remains very limited compared to leaders in the space.

Gavin Wood, Polkadot’s co-founder, and inventor of Solidity as a co-founder of Ethereum, aims to rekindle his past as he announced Polkadot will become full EVM in the future. The future of our L1 chain is intertwined with Polkadot’s. So we can but wait for Polkadot’s roadmap to become clearer. At this moment, when ecosystem activity builds up, making plans about parachains will make sense again.

L2 zkEVM: Facing comparable adoption issues (at our humble level) as Polkadot ecosystem did except for EVM parachains, we decided to launch an Ethereum Layer 2 with a simple goal: making our stack rapidly compatible with, and available to the largest blockchain ecosystem by far.

In spite of original shortcomings and scalability issues, Ethereum has solidified a leading position in the blockchain infrastructure market and confirmed once and for all that “usage is king”. As a result, this ecosystem offers the largest addressable market to builders looking to launch new products.

For the same reason, competition is fierce within the Ethereum ecosystem, with large, tier 1 projects receiving colossal funding to trump the competition. To help our chances of succeeding in this environment, we did what we know we’re good at: we formed partnerships with cherry-picked partners to build a best-of-breed L2, combining security and scalability, and provide a differentiating playground where to deploy our tech.

This network is currently in testnet phase, with plans to launch our mainnet as soon as possible, dealing with Polygon and Avail’s own timelines and deliveries.

TEEs Co-processor Network: Jewel of the Crown, this is the centerpiece of our tech stack. Part of Ternoa’s original design, we created this network from scratch using intel SGX enclaves to securely host the Fortress, a Key Management System used to create secret NFTs or Capsules directly from our L1. We’ll come back later in this article on the specifics of this tech stack, what makes it unique, and how it will play a role in Ternoa’s future.

What are the challenges slowing down the adoption of Ternoa?

1 Smart Contract Language: Our L1 network is high-performing, secure, and decentralized, handling around 500k weekly transactions. However, its potential is much higher, closer to 100M. The reason for this gap is our use of WASM for smart contracts, a powerful but less popular language compared to Solidity. To address this, we’ve opened our L2 to onboard Solidity developers, currently bringing in one project per week even on the testnet. Our goal is to be on the mainnet to accelerate user onboarding.

2 Internationalization: We have a strong presence in Francophone countries and Japan, with growing recognition in the UAE. Entering new markets is challenging and requires significant funding and partnerships. In 2023, we expanded into Japan and are now focusing on other Asian countries, as well as the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. We’ll detail our expansion strategy in an upcoming AMA.

3 Positioning: Initially, we positioned Ternoa as a generic blockchain for various use cases. While we’ve onboarded significant names across different industries, the competition is fierce. Developers often prefer EVM chains with hype to attract users and secure grants.

What are Ternoa’s strengths?

Confidential Computing Expertise

Our technology relies upon Trusted Execution Environments, or enclaves. Present everywhere in our daily lives (smartphones, computers, cold wallets), TEEs have been used by several projects in Web3 such as Golem, Flashbots, Phala, Automata. Over the last 2 years, TEEs have suffered from a relative lack of love, as many ZK proponents were seeing TEEs as a competing tech instead of a complementary one.

The tide is shifting, and as the industry matures, TEEs are better understood, receiving endorsements from leaders in the space.

Versatility

Our industry is driven by techs and their innovations. EVM, WASM, MOVE, SVM, Substrate, Tendermint, PoW, PoS, DPoS — it sometimes feels like complexity and novelty are endless. Being stack agnostic and abstracting ecosystem-specific considerations is an incredible strength. As of today, our team has already delivered a Substrate Layer 1, a zkEVM polygon CDK Layer 2, and built a decentralized TEE powered confidential computing stack.

Resilience

It is common knowledge that being able to withstand tide shifts is crucial to success. This principle is true across any businesses within any industry. But Web3 is a special beast, with the market moving faster than anywhere else, and hype or clout blurring lines, making it difficult for entrepreneurs to distinguish between fads and real user adoption. I am proud of what we achieved, navigating across ever-changing ecosystems and narratives, to keep pushing an innovative tech stack towards real, value-adding use cases.

Reflecting on the Ecosystem and Increasing Risks

Before outlining our vision and future actions, let’s reflect on the global blockchain evolution:

Initially, Bitcoin’s Proof of Work offered the best security consensus. As blockchain technology evolved, smart contracts on PoW emerged, sacrificing some security for agility. This led to cheaper, more agile, but less secure Proof of Stake variations. The ecosystem then evolved into L2 and L3 solutions, offering almost free transactions with off-chain and centralized components. However, most L2s are centralized and untrustworthy, using simple databases. Rollup As a Service (RAAS) companies now offer L2 ETH deployments at minimal costs, gradually putting the spotlight on the importance of trust assumptions underlying our entire ecosystem.

To achieve mass adoption, the ecosystem must improve transaction quality and cost. Recent blockchain hacks highlight the risks of centralized solutions, making it easy to stop or hack chains.

Vision: The Future

Scaling blockchain through modularity means accepting tradeoffs in terms of trust assumptions. But even with this limitation, I believe monolithic blockchains have limited future use. Modularity, while toning down some core value propositions of blockchain, drives evolution and will bring Web3 unification. Users will leverage these technologies without needing a deep understanding, heralding a new era. Accepting modularity and compromise will enable the merger of Web2 and Web3, leading to true mass adoption. In this new era, how can we trust off-chain centralized components without having to consciously understand them ?

IVS to Improve Security of Off-chain Services

As mentioned earlier in this article, we have created a decentralized Key Management System, now used by several dapps. The architecture beneath this KMS draws the outlines of a brand new shared security paradigm. Combining cryptography, economic security, and decentralization to provide a turnkey, easily scalable integrity verification service, “IVS”.

In a nutshell, IVS are about improving trust assumptions borne by blockchain users by deploying and operating any off-chain service in trust-minimized environments. This value proposition can be scaled to internet users, by deploying any online service is trust-minimized environments.

From a technical perspective, you can picture IVS as a protocol built on top of Ternoa TEE Network. It allows app and chain infra developers to retain their existing architectures for development, but allows for verification of their services on deployment. It allows for detection of faults and malicious activity that were previously not detectable and provable. Verification of services is performed using cryptography and mathematical proofs. It is a new verification layer for offchain and online services alike. IVS also additionally incorporates a shared security protocol where anyone can stake their $CAPS tokens on operators. With IVS, developers can prove their components’ trustworthiness.

Examples of IVS in Action:

IVS can prove the integrity of off-chain components such as:

For instance:

• Layer 2 Deployment: IVS ensures the integrity of Layer 2 configurations, preventing censorship or fund theft.
• Explorers: IVS guarantees the integrity of centralized scripts running explorers, preventing censorship and displaying accurate content.

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IVS on Ternoa

We are working relentlessly to ensure Ternoa has a relevant place within the future of blockchain. This is what prompts us to always push further our R&D, and explore use cases where our tech stack and capabilities can stand out.

IVS will be needed as more and more off-chain services are deployed to scale ethereum. And tomorrow, IVS will be able to improve overall internet security, verifying integrity of online services at large.

Fundamental bricks of IVS already exist on our Substrate L1 chain, but current IVS are specific to one off-chain service. We now have two goals in the near future:

• Making these bricks available on ETH ecosystem
• Making IVS accessible to any off-chain service

⠀This will require substantial efforts, and partners to achieve an ambitious vision. We have already started identifying off-chain services provider showing interest to add IVS to their offering.

The teams are working on making IVS a thing, and we will be sharing more details about our IVS R&D and implications for Ternoa in September, with a series of AMA and publications.

In the meantime, stay tuned for more updates, and thank you for your continued support in rough market conditions.