What the point of smart contract?
Smart contracts are self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement between buyer
and seller being directly written into lines of code. The code and the agreements contained
therein exist across a distributed, decentralized blockchain network. Smart contracts permit
trusted transactions and agreements to be carried out among disparate, anonymous parties
without the need for a central authority, legal system, or external enforcement mechanism. They
render transactions traceable, transparent, and irreversible.
And how it works technically?
The INS Platform is designed as a very high-load system. The market potential for the INS
ecosystem consists of billions of users, each of them making dozens of orders per year. The
main focus is on performance, in which we seek smart contracts support, predictability, stability,
and ease of use. We plan to use the most proven and scalable open source technologies and
constantly monitor alternative technical implementations.
As the existing blockchain platforms such as Ethereum have inherent limitation in transaction
bandwidth (currently limiting to a dozen tx/sec), and prospective platforms and frameworks are
only in the development stage, we also consider designing and developing our own INS
blockchain platform in the future, where nodes are selected from a semi-trusted set of
supporters. Given the trust in the nodes, we will implement one of much faster consensus
algorithms from the BFT family (HoneyBadgerBFT/Zyzzyva/others), enabling up to thousands
transactions per second. A smart contract virtual machine will run on top of the consensus
algorithm. The state of the INS blockchain will be regularly anchored to the most popular smart
contract ledgers (at least ETH) so that proofs of state and proofs of transaction (within INS) can
be verified by Ethereum smart contracts (like it is currently done in BTCRelay or will be done in
the future in Plasma). Common optimization techniques such as state sharding and payment
channels will be also implemented.