Thanks for being patient until I could write a detailed update to answer your questions in this thread and earlier here.
The road to hyperchains has been a long one, starting back in 2016 with a blogpost from Yani that is still the North Star guiding our understanding of what hyperchains can be 8 years later.
Niko announced hyperchains to the general public at the Web Summit Lisbon 2024 conference last week. Hyperchains is on track for its first public release in the coming weeks.
Here’s what you can expect
A hyperchain will be a proof-of-stake blockchain compatible with the existing tools and features built for æternity that will “pin” a hash of the state of the hyperchain to a proof-of-work blockchain selected by the user. We hope to go live with options for æternity and Bitcoin (with more options in the future).
The first release will allow for the following:
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A user that we call an Initiator will be able configure all of the chain performance and token economy settings, e.g., fees, rewards, penalties, etc., to start their own custom hyperchain.
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Validators will be able to stake the hyperchain’s native tokens into a staking contract in order to be eligible to process transactions for the hyperchain, thereby earning rewards for block production, pinning, etc.
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Delegators will be able to delegate the hyperchain’s native tokens to individual validators in order to increase their stake in return for a percentage of rewards (and penalties!).
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It should also be possible to run a hyperchain as a permissioned chain by only distributing hyperchain tokens to validators within an organization or among a selected group.
Here’s when you can expect it
The specification for hyperchains has been updated substantially since the 2020 whitepaper with dozens of improvements and changes published during this last sprint.
The core team is pushing the final code that will mark the end of the development period and the beginning of testing. This is always the most exciting and most terrifying part of software development. We expect a smooth process that will provide the basis for two essential steps: creating a UI and testing parameters of the configurations via economic modeling.
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The first part is easy as the roles and activities involved in hyperchains are well-understood by this point of the development. We are already far along with the look-and-feel as well as the user flows for a web application that should allow for a “no-code” set-up of a hyperchain.
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The second part is less straightforward. The set of dependencies for hyperchain economics is complex with variables like the frequency with which a hyperchain pins data to the PoW chain affecting not just the hyperchain performance, but dramatically affecting the cost of running a hyperchain. Knowing how to adjust the hyperchain transaction fees and block rewards in order to make the chain economy viable for validators is key to the usefulness of hyperchains.
So we will work together with data scientists and economists to help us to do the modeling for the hyperchains economy and use this information to provide guardrails in the web application that guide Initiators to configuring their hyperchains correctly.
Of course, the core team will publish everything open source to GitHub so devs who want to jump right in don’t have to wait for the web application to follow a couple weeks after the final hyperchains code goes live. However, we strongly recommend waiting.
What happens after launch
Hyperchains is the kind of technology that really shines at scale. The æternity blockchain is already great for the other 99.9% of what users need from a blockchain. Large companies that need control over every aspect of their technology are the most probable hyperchains users and the interest we saw at Web Summit confirmed that.
Since the functionality is largely the same as the original æternity chain, the biggest leap in innovation is the level of control that one gets by spinning up their own blockchain. Not compromising on decentralization and doubling up with the best possible PoW security makes hyperchains truly revolutionary, but the use case for a custom blockchain is large-scale implementations.
In the near term, we are working with global consulting firm REPLY Blockchain to explore how they can offer hyperchains to their customers. They are a division of the 20k strong REPLY Group, so we hope they can help us develop hyperchains in the best way possible for mammoth projects with durable use cases.
We are also already looking ahead to v1.1 and v2.0. Updating the protocol is always a big project, so we didn’t want to slow down hyperchains for the first release. However, the second iteration will require a protocol update in order to unlock the true potential of hyperchains. In the meantime, we will work to integrate all of the æternity ecosystem with hyperchains, e.g., EVM bridge, DEX, etc., so that anyone spinning up their own hyperchain can get all the benefits of the æternity universe right out of the box.