What is Chromia (CHR)?

The Chromia project (CHR) is a dual purpose project. On the one hand, it is a proprietary high-speed, low-cost blockchain network (known as Layer1) and, second, it is also a Layer2 (sidechain) solution that can be integrated into EVM-compatible ecosystems such as Ethereum.

GThanks to this, Chromia is designed to enable three goals: first, that DApps scale to millions of users; second, to improve the user experience of DApps to match that of centralized applications and, finally, to create familiar paradigms that allow developers to build secure applications.

Project history

Of course, achieving all of the above is not an easy task. Therefore, Chromia has existed as a project since 2013, when it began development under the name ChromaWay. At that time the project had a clear objective: solve the problems that all users of L1/L2 solutions have dealt with. Namely, scalability, security, and user experience.

The website of this first product, still running, quickly shows us the idea: create a relational database within a decentralized solution that facilitates the development of fast and secure blockchain applications. ChromaWay called this a relational blockchain, an idea that would later be known as Postchain. Postchain seeks to be an enterprise blockchain database solution that can be implemented by a SQL developer.

Thus, the system would have among its capabilities:

1. Having a relational model, which allows the blockchain data to be stored in a relational database that can be consulted through SQL.
2. Postchain would have its own relational programming language known as Rell. In this way, DApps could use the potential of blockchain relational databases directly and securely.
3. The network had a horizontal scaling capacity, thanks to the fact that each DApp would have its own blockchain executed by a subset of nodes. This is a form of sharding as we see it in networks like Polkadot/Kusama and in the future within Ethereum.
4. In addition, the system allows indexing and data queries without performance degradation.
5. The decentralized network was managed by a PBFT distributed consensus system.
6. A dynamic fee system, where network fees could be paid by DApps and their developers, rather than app users, or mixed fee models.
7. DApp-level provisioning, whereby resources are metered by the DApp, rather than contract, to allow greater flexibility and resource usage policies.

Release of the first dev test

The enormous progress made as ChromaWay since 2013 would be synthesized in the launch of a first dev test that was released in December 2018, known as Chromapolis. At this point, Postchain and Rell were builds already shaping up for public release, and indeed they would. First of all, in April 2019 its native CHR token would be launched, at the same time that the rest of the project roadmap was outlined.

By September 2019, ChromaWay announced the release of Postchain 3, its third major release of this technology, which would be made public in October 2019, with the release of the Chromia Testnet. The progress of Chromia continued and by February 2020 the second major release of Rell, the Chromia programming language, was released with its version 0.8.

Finally, Chromia plans its great public launch with the arrival of the mainnet, having already prepared a group of technologies that offers the best of two worlds: the decentralization and data security of the blockchain with the power, speed and flexibility of the database. relational data. The final date of this release is not yet fully decided, but the team has already openly demonstrated the potential of this technology thanks to its testnet and all the work done around it.

Chromia Targets (CHR)

Although platforms like Ethereum allow you to implement any type of application in theory, in practice these platforms have many limitations: bad user experience, very high gas fees, frustrating developer experience, poor security at the smart contract level. This prevents decentralized applications (DApps) from becoming widespread or severely limited in functionality.

At Chromia, we seek to address these issues by rethinking the current blockchain architecture and programming model in order to align it with the needs of decentralized applications. This is how the Chromia team looks for:

1. Allow DApps to scale to millions of users.
2. Improve the user experience of DApps to achieve parity with centralized applications.
3. Allow developers to build secure applications with known paradigms.
4. Allow current decentralized applications and blockchain networks to interoperate, enabling new ways of working between them.

How does Chromia (CHR) work?

The operation of Chromia can be seen as a double system: on the one hand, it is a high-speed blockchain network enabled by a PBFT consensus system in which its nodes maintain data in a relational data block structure. The need for a PBFT system in consensus means that this network works by means of a staking scheme in which we have high-speed generator nodes. The nodes are designed to maintain a decentralized operation and dedicated to the DApps that work on them.

For example, a series of 100 Chromia nodes can be dedicated to creating a sidechain for a specific DeFi application. Thus, only these 100 nodes are in charge of managing the operations corresponding to that DApp, and its final data is then stored in a larger network (which would be the Chromia mainchain) and in which the purposes of each sidechain would be protected. In all these cases, the network works under the staking scheme and using PBFT consensus in order to achieve high performance.

The fact is that this structure allows Chromia to do the following:

1. Maintain a network with a high level of decentralization (or federation, if seen from a certain perspective).
2. High speed operations. The validation of operations in Chromia is thought to be achieved in a maximum of 2 seconds in networks with high traffic and latency, the objective being 1 second.
3. The sidechains can operate at variable speeds, adjusting to the needs of the DApp deployed in each of them. The minimum objective of the same is from 500 transactions per second. By allowing the use of a federation (or sharding) system, the global scalability is practically infinite.
4. Thanks to the use of relational operations, Chromia also has a very high data input/output capacity, which exceeds 100 thousand operations per second, and which also scales according to the number of sidechains and the hardware on which it is executed.

The Chromia token (CHR)

In all this, the Chromia token (CHR) plays a fundamental role within the network economy. First of all, the token can be used as a guarantee for the installation of new nodes, for the deployment and payment of commissions of the DApps in the network, as a staking system and as a financial reward system for the actors within the network.

Likewise, the Chromia token allows developers to create CHR-backed tokens that can be used to interact with decentralized applications in a variety of industries, including finance, gaming, real estate, insurance, and healthcare. Various profit-sharing contracts can compensate investors in ERC-20 CHR tokens. Chromia partnered with My neighbor alice, a decentralized NFT gaming platform, in 2021 to provide a dedicated node for blockchain relational validation within the My Neighbor Alice NFT digital world.

Chromia's tokenomics is simple. A total of one billion (1.000.000.000) tokens will be created without further issuance in the future. Initially, 70% of all tokens will be owned by ChromaWay. These will be sold, awarded to team members, invested, or used in some other way. 3% will be put into the contract for automatic conversion from CHR to ETH, and vice versa. 2% will be locked in a system node compensation fund. 25% will be used for promotional use.

Within the ChromaWay pool, 25% of the tokens will be sold to selected partners. The rest of the pool, which is 45%, will be locked and slowly released. The white paper states that up to 17% will be unlocked in the first year, and 12% after that. ChromaWay has committed to holding its tokens for three years. After three years, Chromia's development and governance must transition to a decentralized model.

At the moment, all the Chromia supply is on the ETH network in the form of an ERC-20 token, that supply will then be transferred to the main Chromia network, once it is launched. You can see the smart contract of the ERC-20 CHR token in this link.

Layer2 inside Chromia

As we discussed, Chromia is an independent Layer1 blockchain, but it also has the ability to function as an EVM-compatible Layer2 for networks such as Ethereum or BSC. In this way, Chromia enables the ability to increase the scalability of applications within these networks, taking advantage of Chromia's capabilities.

To do this, each DApp that runs on Chromia operates on its own sidechain, connected to Chromia's mainchain or Layer1 and the source blockchain of the DApp. This allows each app to scale more efficiently and gives each app developer the freedom to choose from a variety of fee structures. For example, one app might require users to pay transaction fees in CHR (similar to how Ethereum or Bitcoin work), while another app might stake enough CHR to reserve computing power and allow its users to make unlimited transactions without paying any fees. .