HPB (High-performance Blockchain) is a brand new blockchain software and hardware system architecture, featuring a chip acceleration engine and a blockchain underlying platform, aiming to achieve performance scaling of distributed applications. Positioned as a user-friendly, high-performance blockchain platform, it deeply integrates with industries to meet real-world business needs. This is achieved by creating an operating system-like architecture for building applications. This architecture provides account, identity and authorization management, policy management, databases, asynchronous communication, and program scheduling on thousands of CPUs, FPGAs or clusters. The blockchain is a new architecture, capable of supporting millions of transactions per second and achieving second-level confirmation through low-latency, high-concurrency hardware acceleration technology.
I. Project Introduction
HPB is a brand new blockchain system architecture. Positioned as a user-friendly, high-performance blockchain platform, it aims to achieve performance scaling of distributed applications to meet real-world business needs. This is achieved by creating an operating system-like architecture for building applications. This architecture provides accounts, identity and authorization management, policy management, databases, asynchronous communication, and program scheduling on thousands of CPUs, FPGAs or clusters. This blockchain is a new architecture that can support millions of transactions per second and achieve second-level confirmation through low-latency, high-concurrency hardware acceleration technology.
In the design process of HPB, contributions and efforts were made not only by the HPB core team but also by partners, the development community, and industry organizations. HPB is honored to be recognized and supported by our partners. Currently, in areas such as anti-counterfeiting traceability, smart big data, and gaming, various industry companies have expressed their active intention to cooperate.
Application Scenarios
Smart Big Data:
**Currently, the development of big data still faces many challenges. As we all know, how to protect users' privacy is a key issue restricting the development of big data. Numerous practical cases illustrate that even harmless data, once collected in large quantities, carries the risk of exposing personal privacy. In addition, big data may also encounter potential security risks during storage, processing, and transmission. To achieve big data security and privacy protection, solely restricting service providers from collecting user information through technical means is extremely difficult. **
To unlock the potential value of data sharing, we need better solutions for managing data security. Centralized IT systems offer advantages in terms of efficiency, but frequent data breaches, lack of transparency, and data incompleteness urgently require distributed consensus mechanisms to compensate for these shortcomings. Blockchain is a distributed ledger that provides traceable and tamper-proof records. Blockchain technology can provide optimized solutions for a fundamentally secure health IT ecosystem. HPB, through smart contracts, enables data collection, usage, authorization, etc., ensuring the purity of data. HPB creates a favorable ecosystem for building smart big data using blockchain data, which will significantly improve the security, privacy, and usability of data in the future. At the same time, the authorized transmission, use, and query transaction fees of data on the public chain can be resolved by charging in HPB tokens.
China UnionPay's UnionPay Zhihui, specializing in big data innovation, has joined the HPB cooperation and R&D team after listening to HPB's design philosophy, jointly exploring the technological practices of financial big data and high-performance blockchain platforms. Currently, in-depth discussions and exploration have been conducted on aspects such as big data authorization, certification, and traceability. Detailed demand surveys and feasibility studies are underway around this scenario, with the expectation of implementing specific projects in Q3 2018. UnionPay Big Data currently processes 80% of bank transaction data in China, with an annual transaction volume of 800 billion yuan. HPB will work hand-in-hand with UnionPay to provide solutions for industries such as banking, insurance, retail, and fintech.
Blockchain Games:
Currently, in addition to Free-to-Play (F2P) Games, the main business models of online games are divided into two types: users pay for game experience time and users pay for value-added services such as purchasing virtual in-game items.
Virtual in-game items are provided by centralized service providers. For commercial purposes, centralized service providers typically restrict the transfer of in-game items, allowing users to use them only on their proprietary platforms, not for circulation. For users with needs, they may initiate transactions of virtual in-game items outside the gaming environment. Due to information asymmetry and other reasons, the transaction process is cumbersome, and users may encounter fraud. For centralized service providers, developing and managing platforms for virtual in-game items is time-consuming and expensive, while directly prohibiting transactions between users is easier. During this process, users' virtual in-game items may be lost, confiscated, or modified, but users lack the right to claim virtual assets. In addition, online games may also have a closed economic system, involving production, distribution, exchange, and consumption, just like the real world. Inflation and deflation cannot be avoided.
If virtual in-game items are stored on the blockchain, with cryptocurrencies such as HPB replacing the virtual game currency provided by game publishers, then there is no need for game publishers and centralized entities like Google Play or App Store. Virtual in-game items can circulate conveniently between users. At the same time, decentralized virtual game currency production methods and shared ledger transaction processes will eliminate opacity and inflation within the game to some extent. Furthermore, virtual game assets can also become securitized.
HPB, through its software and hardware system architecture design, stably supports millions of concurrent users, making it widely applicable in the online gaming field.
Anti-Counterfeiting Traceability:
**In recent years, with the development of the world economy, the evolution of the age structure of consumer groups, and the flattening of global consumption gaps, consumers have increasingly demanded higher quality of life and food safety. Traditional consumption patterns are shifting towards new consumption patterns characterized by quality, diversity, and information. To meet consumer demand, various new products have emerged in the market, but the problem of counterfeit and shoddy products has also arisen. According to a survey released by the French Federation of Manufacturers, counterfeit and fake products account for about 5% of total world trade, exceeding $110 billion, resulting in direct or indirect economic losses of hundreds of billions of dollars. Counterfeiting in areas such as food, processed foods, medicine, health products, luxury goods, publishing IPs, and collectibles not only harms the interests of producers and consumers but also poses a potential threat to consumer health and safety. The negative impact on the market and brands is immeasurable. **
Information asymmetry between consumers and goods makes it difficult for consumers to trace the origin of goods. While technologies such as barcodes and QR codes exist for anti-counterfeiting traceability, on the one hand, one-way traceability gradually loses accuracy during complex dissemination; on the other hand, under the temptation of profit, counterfeiting technologies are constantly upgrading, potentially breaking through the anti-counterfeiting traceability defense line at any time.
The blockchain technology provided by HPB can form a closed information loop from producer to consumer. Blockchain technology's distributed ledger and its traceable and tamper-proof nature make it inherently suitable for anti-counterfeiting traceability—the decentralized authentication process prevents falsification and tampering with information at a single stage. Consumers only need to find the identification code on the product and can trace the production and logistics information of the product by scanning the code. HPB has undertaken various intent-based collaborations in different application scenarios.
Technical Overview
BOE:
**Traditional blockchain nodes, functions such as transaction broadcasting, transaction verification, block broadcasting, and block generation are all implemented at the software level. Data connections between each node are processed serially, resulting in a complex network topology, long latency, low serial processing performance, and poor user experience. **
**To address these issues, HPB innovatively designed the BOE technology, which stands for Blockchain Offload Engine. This engine is a heterogeneous processing system, including BOE hardware, BOE firmware, and matching system software. This heterogeneous processing system combines the serial capabilities of the CPU with the parallel processing capabilities of FPGA/ASIC chips to achieve high-performance and high-concurrency computing acceleration. **
BOE devices connect to other devices in the P2P network through gigabit/ten-gigabit Ethernet interfaces. The MAC module processes Ethernet datagrams and interacts with the TOE module. The BOE module implements the parsing of TCP and UDP datagrams, with the processing done without CPU involvement, saving CPU resource consumption. The BOE module is responsible for establishing encrypted communication channels with other nodes through the TOE module, performing integrity checks, signature verification, and account balance verification on received transactions, blocks, and other messages. It handles oversized data to be sent for block data segmentation and encapsulation of each segment to ensure the integrity of received data. It also conducts statistics based on the received traffic of each TCP connection to be able to allocate corresponding incentives according to contributions to the system, attracting more users to participate in maintaining network operation.
Consensus Algorithm:
To adapt to the requirements of BOE technology and maximize security and TPS1, the HPB consensus algorithm adopts a highly efficient two-layer election mechanism, namely outer layer election and inner layer election.
Outer Layer Election: Using node contribution value evaluation metrics, select high-contribution value node members from numerous candidate nodes.
Inner Layer Election: Based on the Hash queue anonymous voting mechanism, during each block generation, calculate the priority of high-contribution value nodes for generating blocks. High-contribution value nodes with higher priority enjoy the privilege of generating blocks first.
In the overall consensus algorithm design, the HPB consensus algorithm's lightweight message exchange mechanism significantly surpasses other consensus algorithms in terms of consensus efficiency, while also making significant improvements in security and privacy.
Application Services:
Blockchain Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
At the blockchain base layer, a series of blockchain data access and interaction interfaces are designed and provided. JSON-RPC and RESTful APIs are used to support various applications and development languages. Support multi-dimensional blockchain data query and transaction submission, etc., for blockchain interaction operations. In different business scenarios, interactive access interfaces can be further integrated with permission control systems.
Application Development Kits (Application SDKs)
Application Software Development Kits (Application Software Development Kit) are comprehensive functional service packages based on different development languages to operate the blockchain, providing comprehensive service function interfaces for encryption, data signing, transaction generation, etc. They can be extended to integrate specific business logic functions, seamlessly supporting integration and function expansion of various language business systems. Support will be provided for multiple language SDKs including Java, JavaScript, .NET, Ruby, and Python.
Smart Contracts:
Generic Virtual Machine Mechanism:
**HPB adopts a plug-in design, supporting multiple virtual machines, and adjusting the supported virtual machine list based on market demand. The underlying virtual machine is combined with upper-layer high-level programming language parsing and conversion, flexibly supporting basic applications of virtual machines. Customized API operations are implemented to achieve external interfaces of virtual machines, flexibly interacting with ledger data and external data. This mechanism achieves high performance of smart contract runtime equivalent to native code execution. It also implements a generic virtual machine mechanism supporting different blockchains. **
Smart Contract Lifecycle Management:
For each smart contract, as a chain asset, full lifecycle management is implemented. Complete and controllable process management is performed for smart contract submission, deployment, usage, and cancellation, and permission management mechanisms are integrated to comprehensively manage the security of various operations on smart contracts.
System Management
System Upgrades:
HPB employs a combined software and hardware solution in its technology, with the system architecture divided into four layers: hardware layer, hardware abstraction layer, middleware layer, and implementation layer. Software and hardware versions at each layer need to be compatible with each other. Addressing the complexity of the system, HPB provides system upgrade services. Through simple command operations, it can achieve functions such as compatibility checks, automatic downloads, automatic upgrades, and automatic deployments of versions at each layer.
System Monitoring:
Visual application and log system monitoring of blockchain systems, networks, and nodes, real-time alerts and notifications for various anomalies, support for remote fault recovery in specific situations, network system restarts, and other services. Supports comprehensive monitoring expansion and system upgrades based on different business domain needs.
II. Review
HPB is a public chain that adopts a brand new software and hardware system architecture, combining a hardware acceleration engine (BOE) and high-performance software to achieve performance scaling of blockchain distributed applications.
The BOE hardware acceleration engine is a heterogeneous processing system, including BOE hardware, BOE firmware, and matching system software, achieving high-performance and high-concurrency computing acceleration. BOE hardware can effectively enhance DApp functions, such as generating hardware random numbers. HPB provides a complete blockchain solution, attracting renowned companies such as UnionPay Zhihui and Ping An Huayu to use the HPB platform to jointly build a decentralized global public chain ecosystem.
Related Links:
http://www.hpb.io/
http://www.qukuaiwang.com.cn/szhb/2212.html###
https://bitmaxhelp.zendesk.com/hc/zh-cn/articles/360031565654-High-Performance-Blockchain-HPB-
