Exploring The Potential Of NFTs: A Journey Into Technical Details, Use Cases, And Gateway.Fm’s Palm Network Migration To L2

The explosion in popularity of Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in 2021 took the Web3 world by storm , offering unprecedented opportunities for creators to showcase their skills to new audiences and harness the potential of blockchain technology to expand their earning power. With Palm.network, NFTs represent a unique asset in the digital world that can be anything from digital art to digital fan article assets. In those specific cases, NFTs leverage blockchain technology to provide proof of ownership and provenance for these digital assets, ensuring their uniqueness and authenticity, and allowing for the creation of verifiable digital scarcity.

NFT Use Cases

NFTs have found a multitude of applications across various sectors, such as the live events space. In this realm, NFTs provide verifiable ownership and easy transferability of tickets, while also enabling musicians to sell unique music and concert experiences, fostering a direct connection with fans and facilitating new revenue streams. NFTs are also being used in digital art, where artists can directly sell their artworks to collectors without the need for intermediaries. This not only ensures that artists are fairly compensated for their work but also allows for the creation of provable digital scarcity, adding value to the artwork. For example, Palm NFT Studio has developed projects with Major League Baseball (MLB), DC Comics, HENI and Getty Images. These projects had the right recipe for successful NFT release strategy: a pre-existing fan base, a history of collecting rare items, and the possibility of selling NFTs in limited batches or even as unique items.

Palm.network’s migration to zkEVM

With the implementation lead service from gateway.fm, Palm.network successfully migrated from a sidechain running on Hyperledger Besu to running on Polygon’s Chain Development Kit (CDK) as a initial phase in the direction of ZK. This migration was a significant step towards the more efficient chain and aimed to enhance the performance, scalability, and security capabilities of the Palm network.

The migration involved transitioning to the Edge client, which featured support for IBFT 2.0 (Istanbul Byzantine Fault Tolerance) and Enhanced Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus algorithms, as well as PolyBft (Polygon Byzantine Fault Tolerance). The tailored Edge client for Palm could seamlessly switch between these consensus mechanisms at the fork point and also facilitate the migration from devp2p (Besu) to libp2p (Edge) at the same juncture. Throughout this process, transaction and block history remained intact, as data was synchronized from the old network up to the fork point. Once migrated, new nodes were able to sync the entire blockchain history directly from the newly migrated Edge nodes without the need of snapshots or keeping the older Besu nodes running, a first for the industry.

The migration to Layer 2 using Polygon’s Chain Development Kit (CDK) is the first step to enhancing both the security and performance of the Palm network in several ways.

In this initial phase, the network successfully attained increased decentralization, enabling the continuous addition of validators. The primary goal of this interim stage was to advance the network to CDK, serving as a foundational step toward complete ZK integration. This transition was executed seamlessly, with users not detecting any changes.

Transitioning to full zkEVM in the next phase will result in improvements to security, performance, and a reduction in transaction fees:

Security Enhancements:

1. Zero-Knowledge Proofs: The Polygon CDK uses zero-knowledge proofs, which are cryptographic techniques that allow one party to prove to another that they know specific information without revealing any details about that information. Zero-knowledge proofs ensure cryptographic security and near-instant finality.
2. Immutability and Interoperability: All chains deployed using the Polygon CDK are interoperable, meaning they can interact and share information with each other securely. This eliminates the risk of data silos and creates a more secure network.

Performance Improvements:

1. Improved Scalability: The Polygon CDK provides a scalable solution for the Palm network. It allows for the easy deployment of interoperable, ZK-powered Ethereum L2s, which can handle a high volume of transactions, leading to improved scalability.
2. Enhanced Transaction Throughput: By leveraging the Polygon CDK, the Palm network achieves an improved transaction throughput. This means it can process more transactions per second, enhancing the overall performance.

Conclusion:

Transition to Polygon CDK represents the initial move towards a transformative phase, geared towards seamlessly improving performance and security for users while minimizing transaction fees. Already in this early phase of transition:

The network’s security is strengthened by sending chain data to L1, enabling new nodes to independently verify data accuracy. Moreover, scalability is improved through the seamless addition of validators, a process actively undertaken by Palm. Notably, all processing occurs within the node itself, eliminating the need for a sequencer/aggregator model at this stage.