2023-11-09

Published on Thursday, November 9, 2023

By PermaDAO

In everPay everVision Layer 2 SCP EverID Permaswap

Tags everPay

everPay: Real-Time Payment “Layer 2” Based on Arweave and SCP

Web3 is booming, and Arweave is becoming a popular infrastructure choice for developers. PermaDAO is a community where everyone can contribute to the Arweave ecosystem. It's a place to propose and tackle tasks related to Arweave, with the support and feedback of the entire community. Join PermaDAO and help shape Web3!

Author: wenchuan @ Contributor of PermaDAO

Translator: Bananaa @ Contributor of PermaDAO

Reviewer: Scarlett LI @ Contributor of PermaDAO

When we talk about 'Layer 2,' it brings to mind Layer 2 solutions for Ethereum such as Optimistic Rollup (OP), Arbitrum, and Base. When we mention ‘Arweave,' we associate it with storage projects like Filecoin and Storj. When we encounter everPay, it might appear to be just a payment protocol.

But what if we combine them?

everPay is a cross-chain token payment protocol under everVision that operates with millisecond speed and zero gas fees. The protocol is built on Arweave's Storage-based Consensus Paradigm (SCP) and enables real-time transactions with theoretically unlimited TPS, offering transparency, trustworthiness, efficiency, and speed. Bundle processing of transactions costs only $1 for millions of transactions. The protocol provides free transfers with no entry requirements, allowing any developer or merchant to integrate everPay via its API.

With so many terms piled together, it can be overwhelming. Let's break it down step by step.

Product and Current Status

As a cross-chain payment protocol, everPay offers the following functions:

One-Click Cryptocurrency Purchase

Users can purchase USDC with fiat currency through a third-party provider, Legend Trading. It currently supports seven fiat currencies: USD, EUR, AUD, GBP, CHF, JPY, and CAD. Legend Trading is a compliant financial institution based in the United States, serving over 800 institutions in more than 150 countries, with a monthly trading volume exceeding $1 billion. It also provides the underlying fiat channels for Alchemy Pay.

Image Source: everPay

Cross-Chain Asset Support

everPay allows users to deposit and withdraw assets across multiple blockchains. Currently, it supports six different blockchains, including Ethereum, Arweave, Moonbeam, Conflux, BSC (Binance Smart Chain), and PlatON, as well as 29 different types of tokens. Most of the supported tokens are associated with the Arweave ecosystem.

Image Source: everPay

From the chart sorted by market value below, the main assets in everPay are stablecoins, AR, and ETH.

Currently, the total locked amount across various chains exceeds $1.1 million, with the majority coming from the Arweave and Ethereum blockchains.

Image Source: everScan

Wallet

Real-time payments, millisecond-level transaction speeds, zero gas fees are the key features of everPay, providing an online transaction experience similar to traditional payment products like Alipay.

everPay has already processed over 20 million transactions, surpassing the 10 million milestone in just one and a half months. This growth reflects the tremendous potential of everPay.

everPay currently has more than 16,000 users, with three types of account types: ETH addresses, AR addresses, and Email addresses (implemented by EverID). Among these, ETH addresses make up 89% and represent the primary user base.

Swap

everPay supports simple token swaps, powered by Permaswap. Permaswap is a non-chain Decentralized Exchange (DEX) and is also a product under everVision.

NFT Auctions

This feature primarily involves collaborations with projects in the Arweave ecosystem. Auction proceeds are distributed to users, artists, and everPay NFT holders. Holders of everPay NFTs can participate in Permaswap mining.

EverID

EverID is the latest product introduced by everPay, serving as an identity account system for managing digital assets in the network. EverID allows users to create everPay asset accounts quickly through various means like Crypto wallet addresses and email addresses, lowering the entry barriers to Web3 and eliminating the need to manage keys. EverID is currently in the testing phase.

Protocol Architecture

The everPay protocol primarily focuses on cross-chain assets, deposits. It adopts an asset locking and minting/burning model, where in its business logic, these correspond to Mint, Transfer, Burn operations. For cross-chain validation, three roles in the protocol coordinate the process: Coordinators, Detectors, and Watchmen.

Coordinators: Responsible for transaction validation and on-chain submission.
Detectors: Automatically download and verify on-chain data, generating a global state and maintain balance information.
Watchmen: Multi-signature governance members, proposing and signing proposals. Proposals can only be executed after receiving the signatures of the majority (>51%) of Watchmen.

We use two processes, "Mint" and "Burn," to understand the cross-chain asset movement in everPay:

Mint

Using everPay for payments requires users to deposit assets from the original chain into the everPay protocol. For example, when an Ethereum user wants to deposit ETH into everPay, he needs to send his ETH to the locking address on the Ethereum network provided by everPay. Coordinators then verify whether the user has sent ETH, whether Ethereum has confirmed the transaction, and whether the ETH is in the locking address. Once confirmed, Coordinators record the transaction in everPay and submit it to the Arweave network. After completion, the user's everPay account will show an equivalent amount of ETH, signifying the completion of the asset "Mint”.

Burn

When a user wants to withdraw assets from everPay back to Ethereum, they initiate a withdrawal. Users must first ensure they have enough ETH in everPay. Withdrawal transactions need to be batched and submitted to the Arweave network. Watchmen monitor withdrawal transactions, independently verifying and proposing them. Once a proposal is signed by over 51% of Watchmen, the locking contract on Ethereum will execute the withdrawal transaction, transferring the assets to the user's Ethereum address while simultaneously "Burning" the assets in the user's everPay account.

In both processes, we see the roles of Coordinators and Watchmen. But what about Detectors? In practice, anyone can become a Detector by downloading everPay's off-chain smart contract. Detectors can access everPay's final state, which is sourced from the Arweave network and is immutable and traceable.

Security Assumptions

As everPay is fundamentally a cross-chain payment protocol, security is the most crucial concern for such products/protocols. In the event of an attack, user assets can be at risk, making cross-chain a challenging and high-risk field.

How does everPay ensure security?

Security assumptions for cross-chain asset security usually involve the 51% attack and honest nodes. This means assuming that most of the validators in the protocol are honest. If malicious actors want to launch an attack, they need to "bribe" at least 51% of the validators to achieve consensus. In the “Burn” process mentioned above, you can see that multi-signatures in everPay also require signatures from at least 51% of Watchmen. However, managing assets through multisignature has its own risks, a common downside for most cross-chain projects.

However, everPay has a unique advantage in terms of consensus.

The consensus in everPay is based on the Storage-based Consensus Paradigm (SCP). SCP is a new blockchain application development paradigm proposed by outprog, the founder of everVision. It draws inspiration from Arweave's SmartWeave and Ethereum's Rollup. The core idea is that as long as storage is immutable, and transactions on top of it are traceable, executing the application anywhere will yield the same result. This means that consensus does not necessarily require distributed computing.

SCP separates computation and storage, with blockchain only handling data storage. Computation and generated state are stored off-chain by clients/servers. While Ethereum refers to itself as the "world computer," SCP, utilizing Arweave, operates as a "world hard drive." All raw transaction data is stored on the Arweave network, providing immutability and traceability. Based on Arweave and SCP, anyone can download everPay's data and verify it. In other words, the three roles in everPay—Coordinators, Detectors, and Watchmen—run the same verification components and can load blockchain data to check transaction status. If Coordinators and Detectors have conflicting states, it indicates fraud. The preservation of original data guarantees consensus validation. Additionally, SCP uses off-chain smart contracts and does not limit programming languages, reducing the learning curve for developers.

The logic of off-chain computation can be easily compared to Ethereum's Rollup, which is why everPay, based on SCP, can be considered Arweave's Layer 2.

Breaking down the blockchain into data availability, consensus, settlement, and execution layers allows us to see more clearly what Arweave and SCP have achieved. Compared to Celestia and various sovereign Rollups that aim to achieve this, Arweave and SCP have already taken the lead, allowing developers to start building dApps on Arweave and SCP immediately.

everPay + EverID = ?

Web3 has been waiting for mass adoption, but the challenge lies in onboarding billions of Web2 users who are not familiar with blockchain's underlying logic like public keys, private keys, and mnemonic phrases. These users require simple registration and operations. Account Abstraction (AA) was proposed to abandon Externally Owned Accounts (EOA) and uses smart contract accounts for on-chain operations. However, the underlying logic remains the same: smart contract accounts still map to a blockchain address. EverID, on the other hand, offers a different way to lower the entry barriers.

EverID adopts the mature FIDO2 protocol, already used in Web2. Its account system can integrate with various applications and services, verifying user identities through biometric technology like fingerprints or facial recognition, or physical security keys. In essence, every electronic device (phone or computer) has a unique chip that interacts with the protocol, generating a key pair. The public key is collected by the protocol, while the private key is only known to the device. Each login requires the device to "sign" with the private key to confirm the correct device used for login. This means users can register accounts using email or phone numbers without any passwords, making login easy.

In the encrypted payment field, the focus is primarily on deposits, withdrawals, and fiat currency purchases. As a real-time payment protocol, everPay's ideal use case should be cross-border payments, where the advantages of crypto payments shine the most due to the absence of banking settlement processes, greatly improving cross-border transfer efficiency.

PermaDAO has already implemented member contribution incentive distribution through everPay, with members located worldwide but receiving AR in real-time. Following this path, everPay could explore more DAO payment scenarios, becoming a tool for DAO payments. When combined with EverID, it could potentially form an on-chain credit system, accumulating a high-quality user base through DAO contribution records and user asset conditions, eventually integrating with DeFi projects.

In the previous cycle, users complained about various blockchain performance issues, such as inadequate performance, high downtime, low TPS, and slow transactions. In this cycle, significant improvements in infrastructure are visible, but there aren't enough applications to onboard users. Mass adoption is the industry's expectation; as without users, everything is just talk. With high-quality infrastructure like real-time payment in everPay and easy login in EverID, we are ready for the applications to flourish and bring a new landscape. We eagerly await this shift.