The Race for a Decentralized Internet: Ethereum and Synereo Compared

The Ethereum project was, and is, one of the Internet's most intriguing and inspiring experiments. It all begun back in 2013, when researcher and prodigy programmer, Vitalik Buterin, proposed a way to generalize the concept of the Bitcoin Blockchain, transforming it from a decentralized bookkeeping ledger into a turing complete virtual machine, or "World Computer", with the intention to run applications, websites and even entire organizations, without having to rely on server farms, as it is the case today.

Vitalik was soon followed by some of the brightest and most committed individuals of the newly conceived crypto-industry, carrying the flag of a new, decentralized Internet; freed from monopoly control and government influence, which cannot be censored, taken down or corrupted. This idea was so compelling, that the project managed to raise millions of dollars in the first few hours of its crowdfunding campaign, reaching a market cap. of about 1 billion USD in less than a year and a half.

But to be fair, 2016 wasn't the best year for the Ethereum Project. In May this year, TheDao, an ambitious project running on the Ethereum platform, was hacked, putting about $150 million in jeopardy, while exposing serious flaws in the basic architecture of the Ethereum system. The attack didn't only highlight the overall callow state of the project, but forced its leadership to restart the entire system (a move called a roll-back), earning it heavy criticism, and eventually breaking its Blockchain into two competing versions.

Since then, Vitalik and his colleges had to admit that the current version of Ethereum is not scalable, and that a lot of work is still ahead before the dream of a decentralized Internet can become a reality.

Enter Synereo

To date, Ethereum isn't the only team anymore working on turing complete blockchains and decentralized computation. Companies like Lisk, alongside a few other competitors, have picked up on the idea, and are trying to improve the concept. The most outstanding player in this bunch however, is a small Israeli startup called Synereo, founded at about the same time when the Ethereum project made its first steps.

Synereo was initially known in the crypto scene for proposing a decentralized social network, but caught the industry in surprise a few months ago, when it disclosed its own proposition for a complete decentralized tech-stack. Synereo's proposal stands out for several reasons, and seems to be the first one to pose serious competition, not only to Ethereum, but to their common opponent as well: the centralized model on which the Internet currently operates.

Comparing both systems, it seems that Synereo is on its way to successfully solve most problems raised by the current Ethereum version, while adding some major features, crucial for a truly decentralized Internet.

Here's a partial list of characteristics, allowing the small startup to pose real competition to the, by now well established, Ethereum Project and its offshoots:

Concurrency and Parallel computation

One of the more outstanding features of the proposed Synereo Blockchain (also called RChain) is its ability to execute operations in parallel, in contrast to the linear nature of all other competing models. These standard Blockchains share one fundamental flaw: in order for the Blockchain to stay reliable and coherent, its entire history has to be replicated on all devices maintaining it.

Synereo, on the other hand, proposes a fractalization of the Blockchain, allowing different nodes to perform different operations at the same time, while processing only what is required for its local needs. This way, Synereo's Blockchain is truly decentralized and distributed rather than simply being massively replicated across the network - allowing it to be much faster than any other proposed model, while being infinitely scalable.

Storage

On top of its Blockchain infrastructure, Synereo stacks a distributed storage protocol, a feature completely missing from Ethereum and most other competitors in the field.

While the blockchain records the overall state of the system — meaning the validity of transactions and the execution of scripts — it is not suited for the storage of heavy media data such as images, videos and text. For this purpose, Synereo's CTO, Greg Meredith, developed a unique protocol to distribute this kind of information among Synereo nodes and then retrieve it on demand.

This is a highly important feature, without which complete decentralized computation would be impossible. Ethereum and its competitors intend afterall to make centralized server farms obsolete, a goal impossible to achieve without the ability to host vast amounts of data and retrieve it on demand, at speeds comparable to Google and Amazon's Data Centers. With Synereo's storage protocol (cheekily nicked Special-K), this ambitious pursuit might be in reach after all.

Social Layer

Synereo's original idea of building a decentralized social network has not been forgotten. Rather, it has been baked into the company's technology stack as its "Social Layer" - providing assets like digital identity, socially generated reputation and networks of influence to all other application built on top of it. This will allow developers to plug into network effects from early on, and other users of the system to easily engage in a decentralized P2P economy, trading goods and services without intermediaries.

Security and Privacy

On of the main features of the Ethereum blockchain is its full transparency. Since each and every Ethereum node holds a copy of the entire blockchain, everything done on the network is potentially visible to everybody else. In terms of security and privacy however, this feature might reveal itself as a bug. Synereo's concurrent fractalization of the Blockchain does away with this state of affairs, and allows every node access to information relevant to its operations only.

Moreover, Synereo uses formal semantics and methods to create, as well as check code automatically. This allows developers to model the exact behaviour of applications built for Synereo, before they are deployed on the system, troubleshooting potential disasters before they happen. This is of outmost importance when dealing with decentralized environments, which don't have a central point of control from which an administrator can stop renegade processes when they go bezerk. The DAO incident, mentioned above, is a very good example of this, and could probably have been avoided on Synereo's platform.

Java Compatibility

In contrast to Ethereum, Synereo's platform is built as a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), allowing the integration of any other Java/Scala/JRuby/Closure application or library with ease. A feature of paramount importance for Synereo's ambitious end-goal: creating decentralized analogs to all existing, centralized web services, and essentially re-creating the Internet from scratch on its own, decentralized platform.

Reflective Programming

Synereo's native programming language (called Rholang), is a reflective programming language, based on process calculus, allowing for the parallel execution of processes and the composition of higher-ordered smart contracts on the basis of lower ones.

This grants Rholang an obvious advantage over traditional smart contract languages and blockchain scripts, and puts it in the same category with established programming languages like Java, C#, and Scala, which have all eventually adopted reflection as a core feature. This is what allows programmers to use programs to write other programs, on which more complex applications can be deployed. Without this feature, industrial scale development would likely be impossible due to complexity.

Modularity

Synereo allows modular use of its tech-stack, enabling developers and users to use parts of its layers, without being indefinitely committed to the entire technology stack.

Upstream Compatibility

Synereo already offers a 1.0 implementation of its technology on which decentralized applications can be deployed, and promises the release of the fully matured 2.0 version towards the end of 2017. All applications build for Synereo's tech-stack 1.0 will be compatible on its Rchain based 2.0 version.
For Ethereum developers on the other hand, reality looks a bit bleaker. Since the DAO hack of spring 2016, applications built on Ethereum are already obsolete because of the serious infrastructure flaws exposed at the time. It will be back to the drawing board for much of Ethereum's functionality, and most of the Ethereum eco-system will have to be recreated from scratch as soon as the system is ready to be updated.

From Competition to Cooperation

With all this being said, it should be noted that Synereo and Ethereum do not seem to regard each other as competitors, a term scarcely used in the crypto industry. The to two teams cooperate closely on some of their Blockchain features, and Synereo's tech-stack 2.0 specification is literally called "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants", more than hinting towards its social and ideological ties with the Ethereum project.
Synereo's ambitions are currently being fueled by its successfully ongoing funding campaign. With this, we can be left with the hope that the coopetition between these two teams, and other players in the space, will eventually lead to the fulfillment of their joint promise: Creating a freer and fairer Internet that works for all of us.