Tech Analysis of Seele Project — not just a blockchain, but a new “Value internet”

Another Chinese blockchain. It seems to be the hot thing right now. Let’s have a deeper look.

Is the project something viable? There were some concerns raised in their telegram and how the team responded

WHAT ON EARTH IS THE HETEROGENOUS FOREST NETWORK!?
How many fancy words can you use to describe this? It sounds quite ridiculous to be honest when i first read it. However let’s dive in further.

• The primary chain is the “Meta chain” and each sub-chain serves as a separate blockchain or fork to serve other processes, but sharing the same libraries and basecode. This is the essence of the forest network, allowing blockchains 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 to interact.
• This means unlimited chains and projects can be made from the Seele meta-chain. It also means that any bugs that can affect all systems be repaired quickly. It seems to me that the end marketing goal is to allow business, or industries to employ Seele subchains for their own industries or requirements.
• So in a way it is like blockchain project Achain or potentially other blockchain projects that can offer blockchain-as-a-service but using newer technologies to achieve consensus. This talk of trees and forests almost parallels a Windows Multi-Server architecture, where an organisation can split its servers into Mail servers, web servers, database servers, etc. In the Windows Server, companies segregated by geographical location are known as domains and collectively the entire organisation is known as the forest. These terms were probably a inspiration for these creators.

What else does Seele offer?

• It is also a naming system — YES. There have been many attempts to achieve DNS like services on traditional blockchain without much traction or success. As Seele is their own blockchain, the naming mechanism is part of the project. So instead of sending and receiving tokens from an address like 0x60EFdaC4f6DD5D2464ac1659e70aA1A61B6C9F43 you can send it to something like chain://jt.wallet
• With the new naming system, another http base protocol named VHTTP is proposed as well as a QVIC protocol to replace HTTP. Basically another internet. The team claims they were able to reduce request and transmission rate delay by 70%-500% using a 1GB file transfer on a 50 machine network. I believe this claim, but this was just a single 1GB file transfer and there were no reports on putting the network in real world stress test scenarios. The tech is still in its infancy.
• Storage — Seele even want to get into Storage — think Dropbox, AWS but for crypto assets, not your personal files. So far it is only a proposition in the whitepaper with no Minimal Viable Product as yet.
• dApps development — SeeleEditor will allow creation of dApps. SeeleEditor has not been released yet and its status is unknown.
• Rewards — I mean, this is all what we want to know right? Rewards are given to LARGER and MORE STABLE (uptime) nodes . Rewards are decreased over time. Also a percentage of transaction fees are awarded. Nodes won’t need to do hashrate calculations, but just have“good network connectivity”. Rewards are higher if there are more transactions processed in a block as well. Specific numbers were not given.

Technical stuff explained (to my ability)

• Consensus requirements and speed
  Instead of the traditional model of having a majority nodes vote for consensus, Seele claims to turn it into more or less a mathematical formula to be performed onchain. They have claimed on a network of 100,000 nodes, that the delay in transaction is “delayed to several seconds”. The more modes, the faster the network.
• How?
  It looks like consensus will be done in some sort of parallel manner, and not employing PoW or PoS. They will be minimising nodes required to confirm transactions. This may put the network at risk of a 51% attack.
• Compatibility between chains
  Seele promises interoperability between chains including DAG chains and PoW/PoS chains. Big, big ambitions. Again, no public MVP yet.
• Sybil attack mitigation
  Mitigation is achieved by randomly selected nodes execute calculations using their private key and a publicly broadcasted formula/function. It is innovative but I would like to know how they can guarantee the broadcasted formula is authenticated.
• Fault tolerance
  If a large number of nodes are offline then more votes are simply required to achieve consensus. The limit is 33% of nodes offline.

Team

• Dr Bi Wei 8 Blockchain patents. He is seems to be real , but I can’t find much more info.
• Dr Gong Hui Seems real as well.
• Both attended the recent Davos conference to promote Seele, which is promising and adds legitimacy to the project. This would be quite an elaborate scam otherwise.

The leaders at Davos

Roadmap
Public launch of network is slated for Q4 2018. This is no flip if you are joining the ICO — it’s a HODL. You may want to get a boatload post-ico as well if you want to run a node. I thought the same for Zilliqa but that 10x’d on day one after launch

Community Concerns
There have been concerns raised in the telegram chat and are being addressed by the team:

Lack of Github

• The team have promised to upload github files this week to https://github.com/seeleteam which just started.

Analysis of Github — a work in progress

• So far there have been some p2p files possibly related to the decentralised nature of the network
• bit arrays seem to be used to compact data and improve speed of execution of code.
• Github contributor qiaozhigang joined github in the last week of January 2018 and started to upload files. It may be that the Chinese don’t use github so much as westernised teams. He is also listed in the whitepaper with 15 years of experience with computers.
• Github contributor lucusfly, from Beijing, China has been a part of Github for a few years and seems to be one of the main devs.
• Code imports Ethereum Go libraries, so its seems legitimate in its intention to using the smart contract ecosystem of Ethereum. This is GOOD.
• No actual code relating to the Seele project is noted YET. It’s only been day one so we hope more code is published during roadmap.
• Ultimately we want more information as more code is released, but at least things are happening and the team is responsive.

Overall

So is it a good project? YES - the team seems strong but i feel the price will not truly go up until end of the year. this is a more of a set and forget coin. Hope this lessens confusion!

If you want to wait until more github code is released then keep an eye on it and then jump in. Never do something you are uncomfortable doing.