Crankk is going multichain

Preserving our most precious asset: Kadena

Dear Crankksters,

As you may be aware, Crankk runs on the Kadena blockchain. We’ve previously talked a lot about why we chose Kadena and why we still believe it was the best choice.

Looking back at more than a year of Crankk’s evolution we appreciate more and more the fact that Kadena was able to support Crankk, is able to support it now, and firmly believe that it will be able to do so as the network grows.

You may think that a lot of other blockchains would have been able to do so but we would need to respectfully disagree on that. Fist of all, an automated network like Crankk has much different needs than manually initiated transactions. Blocktimes need to be relatively fast, mostly predictable. Gas fees need to be low and affordable because even under best case scenarios the network will generate a lot of transactions.

If there were no such blockchain available we’d have 2 choices. One is to make the network operation more centralized and just give rewards based on data analysis on a central server. This, in our view, would largely defeat the purpose of a massively distributed network, mostly because the participants would be dependent on that sole source of information, coming from a central server. Providing more granular, unalterable information on an independently operated blockchain is the only way to operate a community network with transparency. The other choice would be to build our own blockchain which would again defeat the purpose of independent verification.

Moving on, we can safely say that Kadena was most likely the best choice out of the very few available. However no-one said that Kadena was built with Crankk or a like in mind. There are some constraints that we have to live with. One is that we cannot overstuff blocks with our transactions because at some point we’ll run into blocksize and similar limits. Kadena’s answer to such constraints is multichain, the number of which currently stands at 20 but is further extendable when needed.

So far Crankk has been operating solely on chain 0 and there’s still room there but with the network’s projected growth it was high time to establish multichain operation. Just a short explanation of what it means. At some point we’ll start onboarding new accounts and gateways onto a new Kadena chain. You’ll be able to secure licenses on the new chain as well as stake and receive rewards there. Operating on a new chain carries challenges with it, mostly in the form of interoperation with gateways on other chains. Without going too deeply into what that entails, here’s just a short list of issues that needed to be solved.

• Gateway’s self-discovery of the chain it’s registered on
• Finding out what chain the beaconer is operating on
• Witnessing to the beaconer’s chain
• Receiveing witnessing rewards on the beaconer’s chain
• Checking licensing and staking status on other chains

In conclusion, we’d like to say that even though Crankk has been operating on a single chain, it took a relatively small effort to make it ready for multichain operation and be confident in the fact that an independent blockchain will be able to support Crankk’s future growth.