The first draft of the Catapult whitepaper is ready for review:
https://nemtech.github.io/catapult-whitepaper/main.pdfPreview:
"NEM had its humble beginnings as a ”call for participation” on a bitcointalk
thread in January 2014. The cryptospace had just experienced a boom at the
tail end of 2013 - although nowhere near where it would go a few years later
- and there was a lot of enthusiasm in the space. NXT had just launched as
one of the first PoS blockchains, and much of the early NEM community was inspired by
and had connections to the NXT community. This includes all three of the remaining core
developers.
Although there was some initial discussion on what to build, we quickly decided to
create something new from scratch. We wanted to challenge ourselves and see if we could
build something useful. As a result of lots of effort - mostly nights and weekends - this
culminated in the release of NIS1 mainnet in March 2015.We were pleased with what we
built, but knew we took a few shortcuts, and continued improving it. Eventually, we came
to the realization that the original solution would need a rearchitecture to fix some central
performance bottlenecks and allow faster innovation in the future.
We are grateful to TechBureau who provided support for us to build a completely new
chain from scratch - Catapult. We are hopeful that this fixes many of the problems inherent
in NIS1 and provides a solid foundation for future improvements and enhancements. Our
mandate was to build a high performance *blockchain* - not a DAG or dBFT based
system. In this, we think, we succeeded.
This has been a long journey for us, and we hope this is the last blockchain that we
build from scratch. We are excited to see what yet is to come and what novel things you
use Catapult to build. We would like to once again thank the contributors and the many
people who have inspired us. . .
Trustless, high-performance, layered-architecture, blockchain-based DLT protocol -
these are the first principles that influenced the development of Catapult.
While other DLT protocols were considered, including DAG and
dBFT, blockchain was quickly chosen as the protocol most true to the ideal of
trustlessness. Any node can download a complete copy of the chain and can independently
verify it at all times. Nodes with sufficient harvesting power can always create blocks and
never need to rely on a leader. These choices necessarily sacrifice some throughput relative
to other protocols, but they seem most consistent with the philosophical underpinnings of
Bitcoin.
As part of a focus on trustlessness, the following features were added relative to NEM: -
Block headers can be synced without transaction data, while allowing verification of chain
integrity - Transaction merkle trees allow cryptographic proofs of transaction containment
(or not) within blocks - Receipts increase the transparency of indirectly triggered state
changes - State proofs allow trustless verification of specific state within the blockchain. . ."
https://nemtech.github.io/catapult-whitepaper/main.pdf
