Looking Ahead

Where to next

Being at the intersection of Sports and Web3, brings a broad range of unique architectural challenges ranging from the geopolitical to the technical; building a network intended to serve multiple industries ATLETA requires immense nuance while retaining maximal simplicity.

The information laid out here outlines the first phase of the network, namely the execution environment. With big infrastructural upgrades on the horizon including a native, adjacent storage layer (potentially to be implemented as a parachain), physical node infrastructure that is geographically distributed, as well as, a multitude of functional upgrades (VM alterations, agnostic interoperability, etc) in the pipeline, we anticipate ATLETA will be a leader in the alternative layer 1 and decentralized economy sector.

Storage Network

Decentralized storage has proven superior across every performance marker, from cost to redundancy to retrieval and beyond. ATLETA intends to realize a native storage layer that runs in parallel to the base chain, for hosting a broad range of files.

The storage network will allow for the natural evolution of the platform into a CDN, and expand the potential surface area for building new companies, applications, and decentralized organizations (such as sport media companies, sports book providers, etc.).

As it pertains to the security and quality of Atleta’s storage Chain, we have opted to explore a solution synthesized from PoS, PoST (proof-of-space-time), and unique erasure coding thresholds (64-SP).

Physical Node Infrastructure

Increase decentralization, redundancy, and censorship resistance through the deployment of physical, geographically distributed, purpose-built nodes owned by the community. Potentially happening in tandem with the rollout of the storage layer, Atleta’s network of physical nodes will play the role of delineating the dependence of the chain from any cloud VPS providers, protecting against potential mishaps within the domain of Web2.

Parallelization of the Virtual Machine

Currently based on the shortcomings of the EVM’s sequential processing scheme, parallelization is one of the most anticipated performance upgrades for the entire blockchain industry that holds the promise to increase throughput and introduce a more robust computing paradigm.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine utilizes a single thread, computing transactions consecutively, resulting in a massive loss of performance. Whenever events take place on-chain, the entire network must allocate resources towards it, causing global bloating (transaction delays, cost spikes) that degrades user experience and disrupts operations.

Alternative layer 1 networks have already begun experimentations in this domain and implemented custom VMs to address this issue, such as Solana (with the SVM). Even though the outcomes have presented interesting opportunities, the Atleta Network intends to handle potentially sensitive data, which requires radically different security and privacy guarantees. Sets of technology that is not, and might not ever become, mature on those networks.

ATLETA will actively be working on the parallelization of its VM.

Privacy

With the intention to bring the entire sport data supply chain on-chain, it is quintessential that the environment in which that data is hosted retains maximal integrity. A core constituent of that integrity is privacy. Continuing to be a major area of research in computer science, privacy will be one of the major frontiers in Atleta development plans.

Biological data and healthcare records have thus far been impossible to bring natively into Web3 due to concerns around privacy and violations against regulations. Personally identifiable information (PII) about athletes, such as their names, hair colors, and injuries, biological markers such as weight, height, age, and diet, and their physical performance, such as speed or accuracy, all deserve to be owned by the user and its privacy retained by the owner.

Given that the current state of cryptography has begun to bear promising developments through zero-knowledge proofs and fHE (fully homo-morphic encryption) we anticipate that will be the bedrock of our research.

Interoperability

ATLETA remains cognizant of the shifting landscape of interoperability solutions. With IBC from the Cosmos ecosystem, CCIP from Chainlink, Axelars CGP and CTP, LayerZero's omni-fungible token standards, Zetachain's omni-layer smart contracts, et al. each exploring different models of trust assumption, ATLETA intends to integrate as broad a spectrum of interoperability primitives as possible (after they confirm the security of their designs) in order to provide a blockchain agnostic experience.

Vertical Parachains

Parachains are a horizontal scaling solutions, meaning that in order to provide higher performance, separate networks must be deployed adjacent to ATLETA. Such as the case with deploying independent chains for each Sport (highlighted in the "Parachains" section of this document).

Example: A default configuration for a Sport chain Sport is issued a chain with performance constraints of 1,000 TPS and 1 second blocktimes. If for any reason, the sport expands by an order of magnitude (10x more players, 10x more fans, 10x more games; for a 1,000x data complexity increase) and suddenly requires entirely new performance capabilities, then the old chain would need to be discarded, and a new chain (with the old chains history) would have to be instantiated.

ATLETA will be experimenting with 3'rd degree parachain scaling solutions that would allow Parachains to deploy their own "side-chains". The full spectrum of implications of such an approach are still to be seen, but it would be assumed that these 3'rd degree chains would share state, security, and native assets with their originating parachains.

Asynchronous State Parachains

In the current model for parachains, ATLETA effectively serves as the DA layer recording and confirming their historic states. The STF (state transition function) logical structure underpinning each chains state transition depends on ATLETA's state; meaning, all of the chains that are linked to ATLETA require that their version of the ledger does not veer from ATLETA's global state (specifically in the sense of history). In this kind of a synchronous state model, all of the parachains rely on one another to not get re-organized or rolled-back.

Example: There are 5 parachain on ATLETA; all of which have a 1 second blocktime and 10,000 tps capacity. Every 3 seconds, ATLETA produces a block containing the proof of finalized state for each chain. If suddenly chain number 4 experiences some critical issue (bug in their consensus logic) and needs to re-org the chain; then ATLETA (and all of the other parachains) would need to halt while the corrupted parachain is reorganizing. *Only ATLETA's DA layer would actually not halt, the other layers would continue to operate under the assumption of "weak synchrony". However, for the parachains it would mean a total loss of synchrony and security. Causing technical complexity whenever they look to re-anchor.

This state synchronicity implies very high guarantees that state does not get corrupted on any individual parachain. However, as can be seen in the example above, the implications of this synchronicity demand extensive care, in the form of slower confirmation times, ultimately imposing operational friction.

ATLETA will be exploring methods of implementing asynchronous state transitions; potentially through adaptations from the IBC (inter-blockchain-communication) protocol currently operating in tendermint systems.

---

As Atleta chain matures it will be subject to the same forces governing over all public digital databases of value, the longer the chain's history, the more valuable it becomes, and the more incentivized fresh history is to find its way onto that chain.