ECOchain – BCS R&D Department’s Latest Project

ECOchain News Announcement

The main goal of BCS is to connect buyers and sellers from all over the world whilst enhancing user experience with VR and AR. Our business model is mostly B2C (Business to Consumer).

We are developing a decentralized application (dApp) for e-commerce, and building a custom blockchain for this propose. This custom blockchain is named ECOchain.

The basic reasons for considering using a blockchain as the underlying technology are as follows:

  • Blockchain is transparent (can be read by anyone)
  • Blockchain is immutable (cannot change/manipulate transaction records)
  • Blockchain is decentralized (not controlled by one entity only)

The three properties mentioned above are very powerful because they can build trust for the platform. Trust is very important for any type of commerce.

The development of our blockchain will focus on:

  • Smart contracts – which will natively support e-commerce functionality. More specifically: transactions, escrow, rating system, product information signatures, etc.
  • High transactions per second (TpS)
  • Almost instant verification (very short new block production time)
  • Ecological friendly (no consumption of electricity, no “mining”)
  • Finality (non-reversible block writing)
  • Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) – users can solve the Know Your Customer (KYC) problem.
Roadmap

Research on blockchain
(End of June 2018)

The research will specifically focus on:

  • Consensus algorithm – which must be byzantine fault tolerance (BFT)
  • Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) – which will probably be based on X.509 certificates
  • Compilers for programming languages to produce bytecode and Virtual Machine (VM) for the execution of smart contracts
  • Comparing existing cryptographic algorithms about future quantum computers threat (quantum resistance) like NTRU, McEliese, Isogenies, supersingular elliptic curves, XTR

Development of blockchain
(End of December 2018)

The core must be written in a strong typed, high performance, compiled language. Third libraries can be used to help shortening the development cycle. There must be bindings to other languages to help developers in future projects. The development of this can continue after the testing and deploying phase, so adding bindings to new languages will continue after the launch of the blockchain.

Regarding the consensus algorithm, there is a trade off between safety, throughput (TpS), and latency. We want to favor throughput over security. That way, we will make clear to the user that we encourage the usability of e-commerce and that our platform is not suitable for crypto currencies.

Testing and deploying blockchain
(Middle of January 2019)

After developing, testing is necessary. Testing in not only about the code but about how the blockchain will behave in a real environment (after it goes completely decentralized). Therefore, it must be lunched multiple times in a controlled environment before it finally can be launched as completely decentralized block chain available to the public.

Decentralized application (dApp)
(Summer of 2019)

Developing smart contracts to support businesses join the platform (B2C). More specifically:

  • Smart contracts to read/write transactions on blockchain. The payments can be gateways like paypal, credit card(Visa, Maestro etc)
  • Smart contracts for escrow services
  • Smart contracts for putting the hash of the product objects on blockchain and contracts to check if the seller is honest (did not change any product info) or not
  • Smart contracts for read/write the rating (score) between buyers and sellers on the blockchain.
  • Read or write other critical data for e-commerce on blockchain (for example, logistics)

Develop cross-platform application
(February 2019 – End of 2019)

Web apps (Android and iOS) using Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) to enhance user experience.

Develop Application Program Interface (API) and tools
(February 2019 – June 2019)

The company will develop APIs for third parties to use for connecting their websites or applications to the dApp or directly to the blockchain. This code will be open source, so businesses can use the API or tools for free. This will give them motive as they will have shorter development cycle for their own applications.