Expert Review

Review and Rating

This review is largely based on the WaykiChain WhitePaper available on their front page and dated back to the times immemorial of January 2018, when the company was just launched by the ambitious entrepreneur Wayki Sun and his team.

Quote: 'The mission of the Waykichain products and foundation is to create an unbiased blockchain ecosystem for the everyone all across the world.'

I am under the impression that the English version of the original text (written in Chinese) appeared after somebody only slightly disagreed with the Google translator. As a result reading it is largely a guess job. However, it's more or less clear that WaykiChain attempts to become yet another 'Ether Killer'.

To differentiate themselves they start with sharding right away and emphasize an application layer.

Quote: 'Combining blockchain with traditional industries applications, WaykiChain will bring this emerging technology to people’s daily life. ... Targeted industry-level applications will also have separate sub-chains built on WaykiChain. Application data are independent and parallel with each other. Application sidechains can define their protocols, such as consensus algorithms'.

Another wrapping which authors attempt to put around their architectural solution is that it (quote): 'uses DPoS+pBFT consensus algorithms to balance overall performance and consensus efficiency.'

How exactly authors intend to combine those two algorithms with those of side-chains' is referred in this paper as following (quote): 'A total of 11 supernodes are set up by voting, and a new block is generated every 3 seconds.' I presume, it means, that they implement pBFT on top of 11 DPoS nodes, with each synchronizing its sub-set of side-chains.

As with all such types of fledgling layered protocols with increased attack surface I will need a bit more time to see how WaykiChain performs outside of its test net before improving their 'Security' rating to 'b' level from the current 'c+'.

Although this 'sandwiched' DPoS architecture makes more difficult for 11 'super-nodes' to collude it still remains possible, specially, when the number of nodes are in hundreds. Therefore, 'Transparency' is 'b-'.

WaykiChain aims to conquer several big markets at once, including that of Lending. For this purpose it creates the internal assets exchange and liquidation mechanisms, which use internal stablecoin (WUSD) as a collateral.

Quotes: 'WaykiChain adds DeFi features like CDP (Collateral Debt Position) and DEX (Decentralized Exchange) right into the base layer instead of second-layer of blockchain to enjoy the best performance, flexibility, usability and extensibility'.

As a result, I am under the impression that WaykiChain creators have lost their focus going too many ways at once. Still, after reviewing their code on GitHub I think that they are technically qualified and know what they are doing, which earns them 'b' on the 'Engineering' side of the rating.

As many other platform in our space Wayki attempts to jump into the WASM 'train' to push adaption among devs by implementing 'Lua' - 'a lightweight and compact scripting language that allows DAPP developers to develop smart contract rapidly'.

Quote: 'Dual Virtual Machines WaykiChain provides dual-engine smart contract technology, which implements Turing-complete computing ability: LuaVM + WASM VM, at the bottom layer.'

With that implementing 'hello world ' takes only a couple of scripts' pages :) I doubt that there are going to be the golden rush to on-board Lua among developers and it might cause some scaling issues for WaykiChain.

On the other hand (quote): ''After running stress tests in the latest version of WaykiChain main net, it is approved that WaykiChain's trading ability reaches an average of 3300+ TPS and peaks at 7800+'.

Still, I settle on 'b' on the 'Velocity' side of the rating.

Result for 'System' (Security - Velocity - Engineering - Transparency): c+ / b / b / b-