HPB (High-performance Blockchain) is a brand-new blockchain software and hardware architecture, which includes a chip acceleration engine and a blockchain underlying platform, designed to achieve performance expansion of distributed applications. Positioned as an easy-to-use high-performance blockchain platform, it is deeply integrated with the industry to meet the real business needs of the real world. This is achieved by creating an operating system-like architecture on which applications can be built. The software architecture provides accounts, identity and authorization management, policy management, database, asynchronous communication, and program scheduling on thousands of CPUs, FPGAs, or clusters to achieve a new architecture. The blockchain can support Millions of transactions with second-level confirmation.

1. Project introduction

HPB is a brand-new blockchain architecture, positioned as an easy-to-use high-performance blockchain platform, designed to achieve performance expansion of distributed applications to meet real business needs in the real world. This is achieved by creating an operating system-like architecture on which applications can be built. The architecture provides account, identity and authorization management, policy management, database, asynchronous communication, and program scheduling on thousands of CPUs, FPGAs, or clusters. The blockchain is a brand-new architecture, which can support millions of transactions per second and achieve second-level confirmation through low-latency and high-concurrency hardware acceleration technology.

In the design process of HPB core chain, in addition to the work of the HPB core team, it also received contributions and efforts from partners, development communities, and industry organizations. HPB core chain is honored to be recognized and supported by partners. At present, in the fields of anti-counterfeiting traceability, smart big data, games and other fields, various industrial companies have shown positive cooperation intentions.

Application scenario

Smart big data:
At present, the development of big data still faces many problems. As we all know, how to protect the privacy information of users is a key issue restricting the development of big data. A large number of actual cases show that even harmless data, once collected in large quantities, there is a 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, it is extremely difficult to restrict service providers from collecting user information by purely technical means.

In order to tap the potential value of data sharing, we need better solutions to manage data security. Centralized IT systems provide advantages in terms of efficiency, but frequent data leaks, lack of transparency, and incomplete data require a distributed consensus mechanism to make up for the shortcomings. Blockchain is a distributed ledger that provides traceable and immutable records. Blockchain-based technology can provide an optimized solution for an inherently safe and healthy IT ecosystem. HPB core chain collects, uses, and authorizes data through smart contracts to ensure the purity of data. Create a good ecosystem through HPB core chain, and use blockchain data to build smart big data, which will greatly improve the security, privacy and usability of data in the future. At the same time, the authorized transmission and use of data on the public chain and query transaction fees can be solved by charging HPB core chain tokens.

UnionPay Zhihui, a subsidiary of China UnionPay, which specializes in big data innovation business, has joined the cooperative research and development team of HPB Core Chain after listening to the design concept of HPB Core Chain to jointly explore financial big data and high-performance blockchain platforms. technical practice. At present, there have been in-depth exchanges and explorations on the authorization, certification, and traceability of big data, and detailed demand research and demonstrations are being carried out around this scenario. It is expected to implement specific projects in Q3 of 2018. UnionPay big data currently processes 80% of bank transaction data in China, with an annual transaction volume of 80 trillion yuan. HPB core chain will join hands with UnionPay to provide solutions for banking, insurance, retail, financial technology and other industries.

Blockchain games:
At present, in addition to free games "F2P (Free-to-Play) Games", the business models of online games are mainly divided into two types: users pay to buy game experience time, users pay Purchase value-added services such as virtual game products.

Virtual game products are provided by centralized service providers. For commercial purposes, centralized service providers usually restrict the transfer of in-game products. Users can only use them on their proprietary platforms, not circulate them. For users in need, transactions of virtual game goods may be initiated outside the game environment. Due to reasons such as information asymmetry, the transaction process is cumbersome, and users may encounter fraud. For centralized service providers, it is time-consuming and costly to develop and manage platforms for virtual game products, and it is easier to directly prohibit transactions between users. During this process, the user's virtual game goods may be lost, confiscated or changed, but the user does not have the right of recourse to the virtual assets. In addition, online games may also have a closed economic system, including production, distribution, exchange, consumption, etc. Just like the real world, problems such as inflation and deflation cannot be avoided.

If virtual game products are stored on the blockchain, and the encrypted digital currency represented by HPB core chain replaces the virtual game currency provided by the game publisher, then there is no need for game publishers and Google Play, App Store, etc. Centralized institutions, virtual game goods can be conveniently circulated among users. At the same time, the decentralized virtual game currency output method and the transaction process of the shared ledger will eliminate the opacity and inflation in the game to a certain extent. In addition, virtual game assets can also embark on the road of securitization.

HPB core chain is designed through software and hardware architecture, which can stably support millions of concurrency, and can be widely used in the field of online games.

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 the global consumption gap, consumers have continuously improved their requirements for quality of life and food safety. High-quality, diversified, and informatized new consumption patterns. In order to meet the needs of consumers, a variety of new products have emerged on the market, and the problem of counterfeit and shoddy products has also arisen. According to a survey released by the Federation of French Manufacturers, counterfeit and counterfeit products have accounted for about 5% of the total world trade, exceeding 110 billion U.S. dollars, and the resulting direct or indirect economic losses have reached tens of billions of U.S. dollars. Counterfeiting in the fields of food, non-staple food, medicine, health products, luxury goods, publishing IP, collectibles, etc. not only damages the vital interests of producers and consumers, but may even threaten the lives, health and safety of consumers, and has a negative impact on the market and brands. The negative impact is incalculable.

The information asymmetry between consumers and commodities makes it difficult for consumers to trace the origin of commodities. Although there are anti-counterfeit traceability technologies such as barcodes and QR codes, on the one hand, the one-way traceability will gradually become distorted in the complicated communication process; Break through the defense line of anti-counterfeiting and traceability.

The blockchain technology provided by HPB core chain can form a closed loop of information from producers to consumers. The distributed accounting of blockchain technology, as well as the traceable and non-tamperable characteristics of the ledger, are naturally suitable for anti-counterfeiting and traceability-the decentralized certification process can prevent forgery and tampering of information by a single link. Consumers only need to find the identification code on the product, and can trace the production, logistics and other information of the product by scanning the code. HPB core chain has carried out various intentional cooperation in various application scenarios.

Technical Overview

BOE:
Traditional blockchain nodes, transaction broadcast, transaction verification, block broadcast, block generation and other functions are all implemented based on the software level, and the data connection between each node is serially processed , leading to problems such as complex network topology, long delay time, low serial processing performance, and poor user experience.

In response to the above problems, HPB innovatively designed BOE technology, namely Blockchain Offload Engine, which is a heterogeneous processing system, including BOE hardware, BOE firmware, and matching system software , the heterogeneous processing system achieves high-performance and high-concurrency computing acceleration by combining the serial capability of the CPU and the parallel processing capability of the FPGA/ASIC chip.

BOE equipment is connected to other equipment in the P2P network through the Gigabit/10 Gigabit Ethernet interface, and the MAC module processes Ethernet data packets and performs data interaction with the TOE module. The BOE module implements the analysis of TCP messages and UDP messages, and the processing process does not require CPU participation to save CPU resource usage. The BOE module is responsible for establishing an encrypted communication channel with other nodes through the TOE module, performing integrity checks, signature verification, and account balance verification on received transactions, blocks, and other messages, and performing fragmentation processing on overly large block data to be sent And encapsulate each fragment to ensure the integrity of the received data, and make statistics based on the received traffic of each TCP connection, so that corresponding incentives can be given according to the contribution to the system, thereby attracting more users to participate in maintaining the operation of the network .

Consensus Algorithm:
In order to meet the requirements of BOE technology and improve the security TPS1 as much as possible, the HPB consensus algorithm adopts an efficient two-tier election mechanism, namely outer election and inner election.

External election: Use node contribution value evaluation indicators to select high contribution node members from many candidate nodes Inner election: Based on Hash queue anonymous voting mechanism, calculate high contribution value nodes every time a block is generated The priority of generating blocks, nodes with high priority and high contribution value have the right to generate blocks first.

In the entire consensus algorithm design, the lightweight message exchange mechanism of the HPB consensus algorithm makes its consensus efficiency much higher than other consensus algorithms, and at the same time, it has also made a significant improvement in security, privacy, etc. .

Application Services:
Blockchain Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

At the basic layer of the blockchain, the design provides a series of blockchain data access and interaction interfaces, using JSON-RPC and RESTful API to support various applications and development languages. It supports blockchain interactive operations such as multi-dimensional blockchain data query and transaction submission. In different business scenarios, the interactive access interface can be further integrated with the authority control system.

Application SDKs

Application Software Development Kit (Application Software Development Kit) is a comprehensive functional service package based on different development languages ​​to operate the blockchain. It provides comprehensive service function interfaces such as encryption, data signature, and transaction generation, and can be extended to integrate specific The business logic function seamlessly supports the integration and function expansion of various language business systems. It will support multiple language SDKs such as Java, JavaScript, .NET, Ruby, and Python.

Smart contract:

Universal virtual machine mechanism:
HPB adopts plug-in design, supports multiple virtual machines, and adjusts the list of supported virtual machines at any time according to market demand. The underlying virtual machine is combined with the parsing and conversion of the upper-level high-level programming language to flexibly support the basic application of the virtual machine. Realize the external interface of the virtual machine through customized API operations, and flexibly interact with ledger data and external data. This mechanism achieves the high performance of native code execution when the smart contract is running. At the same time, a general virtual machine mechanism that supports different blockchains is also implemented.

Smart contract life cycle management:
For each smart contract, it is used as an asset on the chain for full life cycle management, and complete and controllable process management for the submission, deployment, use, and cancellation of smart contracts, and The integrated authority management mechanism conducts comprehensive security management on various mechanisms of smart contract operations.

System Administration

System upgrade:
HPB technology adopts a combination of software and hardware. The system architecture can be divided into four levels, hardware layer, hardware abstraction layer, middle layer, and implementation layer. The software and hardware versions of each layer need to be compatible with each other match. In response to the complexity of the system, HPB provides a system upgrade service. Through simple command operations, functions such as version compatibility check, automatic download, automatic upgrade, and automatic deployment of each layer can be realized.

System monitoring: Comprehensive monitoring of visual applications and log systems for blockchain systems, networks, and nodes, real-time alarms and notifications for various abnormalities, and support for remote fault recovery in specific situations, network system restart and other services. Support comprehensive monitoring expansion and system upgrade according to the needs of different business fields.

Two. Comments

HPB core chain is a public chain that adopts a new software and hardware architecture, combined with hardware acceleration engine (BOE) and high-performance software, to realize the performance expansion of blockchain distributed applications.

BOE hardware acceleration engine is a heterogeneous processing system, including BOE hardware, BOE firmware, and matching system software, which realizes high-performance and high-concurrency computing acceleration. BOE hardware can effectively enhance the functions of DApp, such as generating hardware random numbers. HPB core chain provides a complete set of blockchain solutions, attracting well-known companies such as UnionPay Zhihui and Ping An Interactive Entertainment to use the HPB core chain platform to jointly build a decentralized global public chain ecology.

Related links:
http://www.hpb.io/
http://www.qukuaiwang.com.cn/szhb/2212.html###< br> https://bitmaxhelp.zendesk.com/hc/zh-cn/articles/360031565654-High-Performance-Blockchain-HPB-