A Comprehensive Understanding of the Operation Mechanism and Features of Dante Network

Author: Dante Network

Introduction

In the recently concluded Near hackathon, there was a project that stood out among the many GameFi and NFT projects, namely Dante Network.

The vision of Dante Network is to build the "Internet Protocol" for Web3, a slogan filled with geek characteristics that inevitably arouses curiosity.

Thus, after carefully studying the white paper of Dante Network, I decided to take 5 minutes to talk about Internet protocols, Web3, Dante Network, and the relationships among them.

Internet Protocol Stack

In 1969, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States established ARPANet, achieving interconnection among four large computers located at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of California, Santa Barbara, Stanford University, and the University of Utah.

Since then, the range of this connection gradually expanded, with more and more computers joining the network. Over the following decades, this network continued to improve and refine, including both infrastructure and related protocol stacks.

Little known is that this now-defunct ARPANet was actually the precursor to the Internet. To some extent, without the original ARPANet, there would be no Internet today.

For example, the famous TCP/IP protocol was proposed and gradually became universal during this period, and it has now become one of the indispensable cornerstones of the Internet protocol stack.

As ARPANet grew into the Internet, some standards and specifications gradually took shape and settled down, which we generally refer to as the Internet Protocol Stack. Besides the well-known TCP/IP protocol, there are many basic protocols, such as ARP, DNS, and the HTTP/HTTPS that we often enter in our browsers.

The modern Internet is built on these protocol stacks and the routing and switching networks that implement them. For most of these protocols, the average person finds it difficult to perceive them directly. For instance, we use Telegram and Twitter, but we rarely notice that these applications and their websites utilize TCP/IP and HTTPS protocols; when you want to access "https://www.google.com", the DNS protocol allows you not to memorize a hard-to-remember IP address like "142.251.12.101".

The Gains and Losses of Web3

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," and no one expected that the Bitcoin and the blockchain technology behind it would largely open up people's imagination and construction of Web3.

In 2014, Vitalik pushed it to a second climax, although at that time, Ethereum was far less well-known and taken for granted than it is today.

The original intention of Ethereum was to build a world computer, and in a sense, it indeed achieved this as a distributed, decentralized computer.

In the following years, the concept of decentralization also prompted a wave of innovative thinkers to embark on the exploration of Web3.

Blockchain brought the possibility of decentralized collaboration; however, due to the technical structure of blockchain, each blockchain network is inherently isolated, like a separate computer.

As of today in 2022, besides Ethereum, we actually have many such world computers, such as Near, Avalanche, BSC, Solana, and so on. As mentioned earlier, they are all powerful, but they are also isolated from each other.

Today, we do not know how much new possibility breaking this isolation and fragmentation could bring to the Web3 world, just as people in 1969 could not imagine the revolutionary changes the Internet would bring to life.

Dante Network

Protocol Stack

If what has been said above makes sense, then everything Dante Network aims to do becomes easy to understand.

We all know the famous OSI seven-layer model in the Internet, which includes the physical layer, data link layer, network layer, transport layer, session layer, presentation layer, and application layer. For example, the previously mentioned TCP/IP protocol corresponds to the transport layer and network layer protocols, while HTTP is an application layer protocol.

These protocols work together to achieve interoperability on the Internet.

Dante Network also plans similar layers and protocols from the perspective of fundamentals and commonality, covering a series of methods and standards for data and service representation, data routing, information consensus, and security quality requirements. In simpler terms, it helps everyone agree on a language, allowing communication according to established words and grammar, so that they can understand each other, know who is talking to whom, who needs what from whom, and who has done what for whom, thus enabling full collaboration.

Network

At the same time, Dante Network will implement an instance based on this protocol stack, which is a network composed of nodes that specifically execute this set of protocols. It will physically connect the various public chain ecosystems of the Web3 world, just as the Internet requires a series of switches and routers that specifically execute Internet protocols to connect.

Based on the connections of Dante Network, the various public chain ecosystems will be able to achieve comprehensive information interoperability and even enable cross-chain smart contract interoperability, greatly enriching the multi-ecosystem composability of DApps such as DeFi.

It is reported that Dante Network has already achieved interoperability among multiple chains, including Near, Avalanche, ETH, Flow, and PlatON, and will support more public chain ecosystems in the future.

SDK

Decentralized collaboration is one of the unchanging themes of Web3. To empower the interconnected ecosystem with more possibilities and to allow users to enjoy the benefits brought by interconnection more conveniently, Dante Network will package and provide two types of SDKs, aimed at DApp developers and node/community developers respectively.

Among them, the Client SDK will provide development support for DApps. Through this SDK, DApps can directly call Dante Network's multi-chain services, enabling information synchronization and smart contract calls across multiple chains.

The Adaption SDK will provide development support for nodes, allowing developers to conduct secondary development based on this SDK to incorporate more chains into the interconnection support of Dante Network.

Conclusion

As Dante Network itself states, the realization of all this will bring a disruptive experience to Web3, just as Internet protocols do for the current Internet. Perhaps its value and significance will take a long time to settle and manifest, but that does not hinder our expectations and aspirations for it today.