1. Introduction

Recent years have seen enormous interest in blockchain technology and its potential to upend countless industries, from fintech to real estate, from gaming to social networking. For better or worse, the rise of cryptocurrencies fueled much of this interest — and made “blockchain” a household name.

And yet, blockchain remains unproven in the real world. No matter how much enthusiasm we may have for decentralized platforms, current market-leaders are simply unable to compete with yesterday’s technology.

For blockchain to fulfill its many promises, we must solve several key problems, including:

• Expensive, Slow Storage: Extremely high-priced on-chain storage makes it virtually impossible for large-scale applications to operate on blockchain networks. Additionally, slow access speeds impact user experience to the point of dysfunctionality.

• Unscalable System Architecture: Lacking horizontal scalability, extra resources can’t be easily added to improve overall network throughput.

• Lack of Parallel Execution: Because transactions are processed in serial order, only one transaction can be executed at a time. This wastes computational resources and limits overall processing capacity.

• No Concurrency Support: Smart-contract development is confined to single-threaded model, unable to fully harvest the computational power of modern multiple-core systems.

• Unsophisticated Consensus Algorithms: Current solutions lack the built-in mechanisms necessary to respond to changes in the network environment and resist centralizing tendencies over time.

• Inefficient Network Communication: Low-efficiency network communication protocols fail to fully utilize the available bandwidth and dynamically adapt to ever-changing network conditions.

• Weak Security Models: As malicious behaviors grow more common and sophisticated, self-learning, self-adaptive functions will be necessary to defend the network. These functions are not built into current networks.

• Fragmented Ecosystems: With no universal smart contract language available, dev environments and tools are bolted to their underlying platforms. This lack of interoperability will stymie innovation, as developers cannot afford to rewrite their code from scratch when a better platform becomes available.

1.1. Attempted Solutions

Scattered attempts have been made to address these issues. For example, two-tier networks have been built to improve performance; other networks have introduced off- and side-chain transactions to reduce delays and fees. Still others reduced security protocols to speed up transaction time.

Due to fundamental limitations of current designs, each of these solutions comes at a cost elsewhere on the network. Security is sacrificed for speed, or speed is sacrificed for cost. And so on.

As yet, no public blockchain network has preserved openness, performance, security and scalability at the same time. This is due, in large part, to these four flaws:

• Tight-coupling architecture with virtually no scalability

• Compromised decentralization

• Pseudo-parallelism

• Expensive and ill-defined cross-shard communication

1.2. What is Arcology?

Arcology is the first systemic solution to address all the common challenges faced by the blockchain technologies today with its sophisticated designs and revolutionary technologies.

• Architectured from the ground-up for a decentralized world

• Designed with a market mentality that accommodates today’s real-world applications

• Built on a backbone of high performance, high throughput and low cost.

1.3. Key Features

Arcology has built-in mechanisms to simultaneously meet the needs for openness, scalability, performance, accessibility and security. Arcology introduces several revolutionary features to achieve its goals, including:

• Deterministic parallel transaction processing

• Generic Virtual Machine (VM) containers for incorporating heterogenous smart contract platforms

• Concurrent and parallel smart contract programming support

• Microservice-based architecture supporting horizontal scaling

• Intelligent network communication

• High-performance, low-cost storage

• Multifactor mechanism to overcome the trilemma of security, scalability and decentralization

• Unique self-organization protocols to replace conventional sharding

1.4. Applications

In Arcology, developers will be able to explore a much broader horizon. Applications that were believed only possible on centralized solutions will be made possible without compromising performance. Suggested applications:

• High-frequency decentralized finance (DeFi)

• Internet of Things (IoT)

• Blockchain-based games

• Decentralized social networks