Jehan Tremback

How Gravity works

Gravity is a bridge between Ethereum and Cosmos-based blockchains. In this post, I’ll try to document how the whole system works, in an understandable way, at a medium level of detail.

Announcing the Cosmos Gravity Bridge

We're proud to announce the Ethereum-Cosmos bridge, Gravity, which we will to bring to the Cosmos Hub with a governance proposal later this year.

Blockchain

Blockchain bridges vs payment channels

Bridges and payment channels (or “atomic swaps”) are both techniques to move value and tokens from one blockchain to another (although payment channels also have many other uses). Both techniques have different tradeoffs and do fundamentally different things. They are both frequently hyped as providing cross-chain compatibility, so I wanted

Deborah Simpier is Althea's new CEO!

I’ve been working on Althea since 2015, when I started researching what was possible at the intersection of blockchain and networks (Justin, our CTO, had actually been working on similar concepts since 2013, but we didn’t meet until several years later). Justin and I wrote Althea’s whitepaper

Roles in the Althea network

The difference between Althea and most networks is that Althea is decentralized and so different members of the public can perform different roles.

Althea validator update: Hard fork governance proposal passed

A few weeks ago, we started a governance proposal on altheazone4 to vote on the next hard fork. This time, it will be scripted. Read my summary about it here. The proposal passed last week, and we are currently planning how to do it. We will most likely use a

Monday's hard fork and next validator challenge

On Tuesday, the Althea validators finished a hard fork from altheatest3 to altheatest4.

Althea blockchain update and validator Olympics

We launched the altheatest3 test blockchain. We'll be having a series of collaborative challenges for the validators.

Blockchain

Launching the Althea blockchain

Up to now, we've been running our networks on the Ethereum blockchain. The reality is that Ethereum simply isn't suitable for our use case. Ethereum's great for manual, medium or high value, sophisticated transactions...

How to be a validator on Althea

What is a validator and what do I need?We're currently in the process of spinning up the Althea blockchain. We are using Cosmos, a proof of stake blockchain framework. This post is for those who would like to help validate. A validator is sort of like a miner in

5G brings cell carriers up to par, but it isn't a revolution

There's an amazing wireless technology that lets you download a high definition movie to your phone or computer in seconds. This technology can send gigabits of data over tens of miles in a tightly focused beam of millimeter-wave radio. It will replace outdated DSL and cable home internet with faster,

Making a Cosmos chain

Cosmos is a project creating an "Internet of blockchains" which will be linked together through the IBC protocol. Unlike many blockchains, where your application will have to pay fees to some weird guys with rooms full of GPUs, on Cosmos, you build your own chain, and most tx fees can

Decentralization

Decentralized vs federated payment structures in Althea

Me and Deborah Simpier were just talking about the role of decentralized node-to-node payments vs “federated” subnet DAO payments in…

Blockchain

The Althea governance model

Althea is a system that lets routers pay each other directly for bandwidth, similar to how ISPs peer with one another on the internet…

Ipfs

“New Internets” on Althea

Althea is a network that will provide last-mile internet access with an incentivized mesh network where long-range wifi transmitters pay…

Net Neutrality

Althea and net neutrality

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the FCC’s efforts to get rid of net neutrality. I’d like to take a little bit of time to talk…

Comparison of Althea and RightMesh

Althea has made many careful design decisions to optimize performance and reduce overhead. In this post we compare Althea to a different incentivized mesh architecture and show how each of these choices impacts the final product.

Live demo video

We’ve been hard at work getting our hardware demo polished. It consists of 10 Raspberry Pi’s, running our extension to the Babel routing protocol that lets it route according to price as well as quality.

Althea's multihop payment channels

Althea's payment channels are key to how it works, but they are also one of the simpler parts to implement and explain. Payment channels allow payments to be made with a minimum of overhead. In the simple case, a payment can be made between two neighbors in the network with only one packet.

Battlemesh talk

Just realized that I forgot to post my talk from Battlemesh. Here it is:

Development Roadmap

We are developing Althea incrementally over several stages. The first couple stages are not anywhere near the full capabilities that Althea will have. They are not even mesh networks. However, developing software in an incremental manner lets us test and prove out various elements of the system cont

Battlemesh

Last week I went to Battlemesh in Vienna. Battlemesh is a conference and competition that is held in a different location in Europe about once a year. Its original purpose is to test all the routing protocols against each other, hence \battle\. It's evolved into a great meeting of community network

Pay for forward v.s. pay for internet

We've considered two main mechanisms for an incentivized mesh network so far. Pay for forward is the mechanism laid out in Althea v1, and Hocnet. Pay for internet is something I've been working on as Althea v2 and it is also kind of how ISPs work now. This is a brief summary of both approaches.

Scrooge development: Running code

I've been focusing my efforts on Scrooge, a piece of software that will implement the tunnel-based traffic control scheme I've written about previously.

Route quality metric verification

Any kind of incentivized mesh scheme needs a secure routing protocol. Without this, any node can claim anything it wants about the quality of routes that it has to a destination. Depending on how the payments work, there are a variety of different ways that this kind of routing protocol cheating can