On April 18, 2024, Polkadot founder Gavin Wood announced a major progress in the Polkadot ecosystem at the Token 2049 event in Dubai - the release of the JAM Gray Paper! The birth and development of the JAM protocol has opened up another development path for the Polkadot ecosystem. It will replace the current technical role of the relay chain and help Polkadot ecosystem projects innovate and explore with modular and simplified technical design.

At the event, Web3 Foundation professionals also introduced that the JAM protocol specification will be completed by the end of the year, and the Fellowship will be responsible for development and deployment, and strive to complete the development of 3 independent specification instances, and allocate 1,000W DOT to the team involved in this work. After the event, Gavin Wood expressed his expectations for the future development of JAM through the X platform, believing that this is an important technical direction guiding the Polkadot ecosystem and represents the future of Polkadot.

Seeing this, developers interested in the Polkadot ecosystem may be curious about the JAM protocol. What exactly is such a decentralized network?

What project innovations and new opportunities for Web3 development can it bring? Just over a month ago, at the sub0 conference in Bangkok on March 12, Gavin Wood shared the JAM architecture with everyone for the first time. Today, let us take a deeper look at the technical advantages and application potential of JAM, and look forward to the new trend of JAM empowering the development of the Polkadot ecosystem.

? Click to view JAM Gray Paper:

https://graypaper.com

Stateless decentralized network JAM

JAM is the abbreviation of Join-Accumulate Machine, representing the forward-looking design of the inherited relay chain. As a new network of the Polkadot ecosystem, JAM is a new computing infrastructure that supports multi-core computing functions, smart contract construction and other technical businesses. An early, unfinished version of the JAM protocol was first proposed in the Polkadot Fellowship RFC-31, then known as "Core JAM". Core JAM was named after the collection/refinement/connection/accumulation computing model that is at the core of its service proposition. In subsequent upgrades and iterations, a completely new JAM RFC draft appeared and took shape.

Single upgrade,

Subverting the technical route of Core JAM

Different from the previous technical upgrade route, JAM will be introduced as a comprehensive single upgrade. There are two important driving factors behind this:

• Uniform upgrades will limit post-upgrade operations, which is a challenge for iterative approaches;

• Single upgrade can alleviate continuous small upgrades and major changes that occur regularly within weeks/months;

It is reported that JAM also innovatively integrates elements of Polkadot and Ethereum, providing a global singleton permissionless object environment and a secure sideband computing solution to achieve parallel processing on a scalable node network; in addition, it also supports existing Substrate-based parallel chain services, allowing developers to use Substrate to start project deployment, supporting multi-client and multi-language information interaction and transmission, and maintaining a stable community operation status through on-chain decentralized governance.

Open and free, trustless,

JAM's superior features

It is worth mentioning that in order to make itself more general and open, the JAM protocol can integrate data output into a shared state, providing necessary support equipment for data aggregation; in addition, JAM is distinguished from the common functions of the smart contract chain by non-transaction operations, based on the execution engine technology, it can be compatible with Rollups without complex calculations, all operations do not require permission but are guaranteed to be safe and reliable, which just highlights the trustless feature of JAM.

On such a multi-core computer network, all JAM tasks will be packaged into work packages and other generation operations, and a series of project execution processes will be completed through Refine, Accumulate, and On Transfer to further improve computing efficiency.

Unveiling the operation process:

Breakthrough of JAM protocol

In fact, in the above-mentioned Refine, Accumulate, and On Transfer process, the technical ingenuity and innovative breakthroughs of the JAM protocol are hidden. When JAM executes a project, the three links each perform their duties to form a smooth and smooth operation system:

• Refine is the function that performs most of the stateless calculations, which defines the summary transformation of a specific service;

• Accumulate takes the output data and folds it into the overall state of the service;

• OnTransfer processes data information from other project services;

Refine

During the Refine processing phase of JAM, each time slot can accept up to 15MB of data and last for 6 seconds. Refine generates a maximum of 90KB of data, which requires a large data compression workflow. Refine is able to support 6 seconds of PVM Gas (equivalent to a full block cycle of the relay chain), which is achieved through security metering and the inherent advantages of PVM compared to the first two seconds limit of PVF. As the processing workhorse of work execution tasks, Refine is a largely stateless operation task.

Accumulate

The Accumulate function is responsible for integrating the output generated by the Refine function into the chain state, and can accept multiple output data from Refine, all from the same service. The execution time of each output Accumulate function is much shorter than Refine, usually around 10 milliseconds.

Unlike Refine, Accumulate not only has state and allows it to access the JAM chain, it can read data from any service, write data key-value storage, and transfer funds; in addition, the Accumulate function can also create new services, upgrade code, request preimages, complete the creation of child instances or virtual machines, customize memory and stack configuration, and flexibly perform project calculations within the corresponding technical framework.

Transfer (On Transfer)

On Transfer in the JAM chain network can modify the service state, and supports checking other services and changing its own state, facilitating service communication in an asynchronous support manner. When messages and tokens are sent together, the transfer service function will receive and process them at the same time (if a return path is required, the sending service must initiate another transfer or the receiving service to modify the current transfer state).

Accumulate and On Transfer are both designed to be executed in parallel, allowing accumulation and transfer of different service projects to occur simultaneously. In theory, secondary core projects can be used to execute certain Accumulate processes and provide them with more available Gas space.

Structural differences:

Why does JAM surpass the relay chain?

As mentioned above, JAM is a forward-looking design that inherits the relay chain. In fact, this is not groundless. The important structural difference between JAM and the relay chain lies in the degree of functional fixity:

——Polkadot relay chain is composed of different components, and JAM reconstructs this technical architecture, allowing developers to build a variety of technical services, including general DA services, etc. by displaying basic components, rather than just satisfying parallel chain development.

Although the relay chain has fixed some technical functional elements in the upgrade, such as the language used to define the protocol (WASM), JAM is faster and more stable in this regard. For example, JAM specifies the types used to encode blocks and decentralized solutions. Through its service model design, JAM inherits the flexibility achieved by the Relay Chain WebAssembly meta-protocol.

In this model, the upgradeability attribute is transferred to the technical services, freeing the ecosystem from the upgrade burden, which is due to the optimization potential provided by JAM fixed parameters. With a clear understanding of the specific tasks that the JAM chain must perform and the ability to set fixed parameters, optimizing execution in areas such as network topology and timing becomes more feasible. In the relay chain, frequent changes may be made with each upgrade, making technical optimization more complicated.

Despite these structural differences, JAM still retains the flexibility of application-level functionality, including core time sales, staking, and governance, all of which will be managed in an orderly manner in the application service; in addition, JAM will introduce new concepts by associating token balances with services, providing opportunities for economic model adjustments, which is not easy to achieve during the relay chain upgrade process.

However, the technical and application advantages of the JAM protocol go far beyond this:

• It makes more extensive use of the underlying consensus mechanism , implementing more innovative solutions in a flexible and free manner;

• It supports a hybrid resource consumption model , which reduces costs by pairing services and resource requirements and optimizing validator resource utilization;

• It introduces significant enhancements , providing simplified benchmarking work and relieving the pressure of future benchmarking requirements;

• It retains compatibility with existing settings , introducing the concepts of protocol, multi-instance, and multi-shard smart contracts to manage and execute specific interaction protocols between parallel chains;

Believe in more technical advantages, when you decide to step into the Polkadot ecosystem and start exploring the development of the JAM protocol, you will have more profound, interesting and innovative experiences.

When the underlying consensus of Polkadot 2.0 is gradually formed, JAM chain is the breakthrough new paradigm introduced in Polkadot 2.0, and has the potential to become the foundation of Polkadot 2.0, providing multi-core computing and support for more blockchains, including more smart contracts, ZK-rollups, etc., to bring users more efficient and secure Web3 technology solutions, let us wait and see!

JAM Implementer Bonus Program

And now, there is a great opportunity to encourage developers to explore the JAM chain. Recently, the Web3 Foundation announced the "JAM Implementer Bonus" - a bonus pool worth 10 million DOTs to promote diversity in JAM protocol development. Its goal is to encourage developers to create multiple clients to enhance network resilience, promote and promote projects that have participated in JAM protocol development from the beginning through financial support, and more broadly protect the rights and interests of protocol participants. Reduce the risk of a complete network paralysis caused by a certain error.

If JAM is officially recognized as a Polkadot technology through the on-chain governance mechanism, developers will have the opportunity to receive corresponding bonus incentives. The program will also complement current and future funding plans to support the Polkadot ecosystem and technology stack, including the Decentralized Future Program, Grants, and the Polkadot On-Chain Treasury.

We are particularly interested in proposals that want to implement the JAM protocol in different programming environments. As the full specification of JAM is released, we look forward to supporting teams that are keen to develop implementations in languages ​​such as OCaml, Go, and Zig. ——Web3 Foundation

Currently, the JAM Implementer Grant Program is still in the final application process confirmation. If you are interested in the program and want to compete for the JAM Implementer Grant,

please fill in the form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdvisUospNv_ZUG-RMgCvPD1gp7rtX80Z65NpaQyvovBEf7Zg/viewform

Click to view the JAM referendum proposal:

https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/682

Click to view more about  JAM Achievers Bonus Program: https://jam.web3.foundation/ References: https://graypaper.com About Us OneBlock+ is a global leader in the Substrate developer community as a talent gathering place for blockchain. We will provide professional technical articles and development courses, and organize seminars, hackathon entrepreneurship competitions and other communication and practice activities to help developers master Substrate technology and explore the Web3 field in depth. At the same time, OneBlock+ also provides technical guidance, talent resources and other entrepreneurial support for Web3 quality projects, prompting more development teams to use the Substrate technology framework to build the future open network.

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