Terminology Explained
- XDC mainnet-like network: The subnet replicates the XDC mainnet with customized configurations. It inherits all the highly desired features of the XDC mainnet, including:
- State-of-the-art consensus engine with the highest BFT security
- Native EVM smart contract support so that you have an ocean of DApps to choose from or build your own
- High transaction capacity of 2000 TPS
- Direct access to all the great utility tools contributed by the active XDC developer community, such as wallets, explorers, forensics monitors, etc.
- First-class support from the XDC core technical team
- Owned by you: The subnet will be a sovereign blockchain independent of the XDC mainnet. It will keep running regardless of the status of the XDC mainnet. Its infrastructure and data are all owned by the customer.
- Further protected by the mainnet: Critical subnet consensus data is checkpointed to the XDC mainnet so that the history of the subnet is recorded in the XDC mainnet. Consequently, to successfully attack the subnet and revise its ledger (a.k.a. forking attack), the attacker will also need to fork the XDC mainnet. This way, the integrity and immutability of the subnet are protected by the XDC mainnet.
In other words, the subnet will only be compromised if both itself and the XDC mainnet are attacked. This increases the security level of the subnet to S_subnet + S_xdc, where the security level S is the cost of attacking a network.
- Total privacy: The subnet consensus data checkpointed to the XDC mainnet does not include nor imply any subnet transaction information. Thus, XDC mainnet users have no visibility into the subnet transactional data, which preserves the total privacy of the subnet.
Visualization Suggestion
The XDC mainnet and its subnets resemble the solar system, where the XDC mainnet is the sun and the subnets are the planets.
Objectives
We design a subnet for XDC enterprise customers to have:
- a sovereign, permissioned, and high-performing blockchain (the subnet) fully owned by the customer
- a security level of the subnet transactions equivalent to the sum security of the subnet AND the XDC mainnet
- native EVM smart contract support
- total privacy (i.e., no visibility) of the subset transactions on the XDC mainnet
Architecture
The architecture consists of the following key components owned by the customer:
- a subnet driven by the XDC2.0 consensus engine, with system configurations tailored for the customer
- a relayer program that checkpoint critical consensus data of the subnet to the XDC mainnet
- a smart contract in the XDC mainnet that verifies and records the checkpoints
- wallet APIs that enable additional protection of subnet transaction from the XDC mainnet
The subnet will also natively support XDC's abundant utility tools such as blockchain explorer and forensic monitor.
