Question 11: What is the overall technical architecture of SCDO?
Answer: SCDO adopts a layered design blockchain architecture, primarily divided into protocol layer, expansion layer, and application layer. At the protocol layer, SCDO implements its self-developed ZPoW consensus mechanism and basic P2P network protocol to ensure network security and data consistency. At the expansion layer, SCDO introduces on-chain sharding mechanisms and the Stem subchain protocol: the main chain can run multiple parallel shards to enhance throughput, while the Stem subchain further expands functionality as Layer 2. At the application layer, SCDO is compatible with EVM smart contracts, supports the deployment of various DApps, and provides SDK interfaces for developers to access. This architecture allows SCDO to achieve high concurrency and secure consensus on the main chain while satisfying diverse application needs through subchains, forming a scalable and modular blockchain ecosystem.
Question 12: How does SCDO achieve blockchain sharding?
Answer: SCDO's sharding technology combines the characteristics of network sharding, transaction sharding, and state sharding. Specifically, nodes in the network are grouped into different shard groups according to rules, and each shard processes transactions and account states independently, thereby improving processing capacity in parallel. Currently, the initial configuration of SCDO's mainnet runs with 4 shards. Each shard has its own blockchain (called a local chain) to package transactions for that shard and maintain a light chain that records the block headers of other shards. This way, each shard node does not need to store the complete data of other shards, but only needs to grasp brief block information of other shards through the light chain. SCDO's sharding protocol also supports elastic scaling, allowing for low-cost addition of new shards to enhance overall throughput when higher performance is needed in the future. Through on-chain sharding, SCDO achieves horizontal scalability, significantly alleviating the bottleneck of a single chain processing all transactions.
Question 13: How does SCDO handle cross-shard transactions?
Answer: Cross-shard transactions are supported in SCDO and are ensured to be executed accurately through special mechanisms. When a transaction occurs between accounts in two different shards, the process is as follows: in the sending shard, the transaction is packaged into the local block as an ordinary transaction and records which target shard the transaction is sent to; in the receiving shard, nodes, due to not holding the information of the sender's account directly, need to verify the cross-shard transaction. At this time, the receiving node will request transaction-related proof data from nodes in the sending shard through the network, and then compare this data with the light chain of the sender it maintains for verification. If the verification passes, the receiving shard confirms and executes the transaction; if the verification fails, the transaction is rejected. Through this 'request remote data + light chain verification' scheme, SCDO ensures the reliability and atomicity of cross-shard transactions. Although the process of cross-shard transactions is somewhat more complex than single-shard transactions, SCDO's protocol minimizes the frequency of communication between shards, only interacting when necessary, thus maintaining consistency while minimizing performance impact.
Question 14: What is the Stem Subchain Protocol of SCDO, and what is its role?
Answer: The Stem Subchain Protocol (SSP) proposed by SCDO is a Layer 2 expansion solution designed to support the creation of subchains attached to the main chain. Through SSP, any user or organization can deploy an independent subchain on the SCDO main chain. These subchains are like branches that grow from a trunk (the main chain), connected through a smart contract on the main chain for anchoring. The role of the Stem subchain is to provide a customized blockchain environment for specific application scenarios; for example, a subchain can focus on gaming applications or high-frequency trading, thereby achieving the high throughput or special functions required in that field. The subchain itself can choose different consensus algorithms (currently supporting frameworks like PBFT and PoS) and issue independent tokens to build its local ecosystem. Meanwhile, the main chain provides a security endorsement for the subchain by requiring it to regularly submit state hashes and provide a challenge mechanism. In summary, the Stem subchain protocol gives SCDO great flexibility: the main chain maintains underlying security and value hubs, while various subchains flourish on top of it, meeting the decentralized application needs of different industries.
Question 15: How does the Stem subchain connect to the mainnet and ensure security?
Answer: Each Stem subchain connects to the mainnet through the Stem smart contract deployed on the main chain. The creator of the subchain needs to pay a certain amount of SCDO tokens as a deposit to the main chain contract, and then the basic information of this subchain will be registered on the main chain. During operation, the subchain must regularly submit state summaries (such as block Merkle roots or state hashes) to the main chain. Validators on the main chain will record these submissions to ensure that the subchain's state is tamper-proof.
In addition, a challenge mechanism has been introduced: if any user discovers illegal transactions or states in a subchain, they can submit evidence to the main chain to challenge it. Once the challenge is successful, the main chain can determine that there is a problem with the subchain and take punitive measures (such as confiscating deposits), thereby protecting user rights.
The transactions and consensus of the subchain operate independently internally, but due to regular audits and economic guarantees from the main chain, security is greatly enhanced. This main-subchain structure is similar to a tree structure: the main chain is the trusted root, while the subchains achieve high scalability while obtaining security guarantees close to the main chain through anchoring and staking mechanisms.
Question 16: Does SCDO adopt an account model or a UTXO model? What is its smart contract architecture?
Answer: SCDO adopts an account model, similar to Ethereum, rather than the UTXO model of Bitcoin. In the account model, each address has a balance and state, and transactions directly change account balances, supporting state storage and operations for smart contracts. This model is more suitable for Turing-complete contract execution. SCDO's smart contract architecture is compatible with Ethereum's EVM. Developers can write smart contracts in languages like Solidity and deploy them on SCDO, with contract execution requiring payment of a certain amount of Gas fees (using SCDO tokens). The Gas fee mechanism is similar to Ethereum, used to prevent resource abuse. Due to EVM compatibility, SCDO can directly support standard token contracts such as ERC-20 and various DApps. Overall, the combination of the account model and EVM architecture allows SCDO to have smart contract capabilities comparable to mainstream public chains while achieving higher performance through innovative consensus and sharding.
Question 17: In what aspects is the scalability of the SCDO network reflected?
Answer: SCDO enhances scalability from both horizontal and vertical directions. Horizontally, on-chain sharding allows the mainnet to handle transactions across multiple parallel chains simultaneously, with overall throughput increasing linearly with the number of shards. For example, each shard can handle hundreds of TPS, and multiple shards can aggregate to achieve thousands of TPS or more. Vertically, the Stem subchain provides a second-layer network to further expand performance for specific scenarios (the TPS of any subchain can be infinitely increased, limited only by its consensus). In addition, SCDO has optimized the P2P network protocol, adopting more efficient messaging and storage solutions, so that adding nodes does not significantly reduce network performance. In practical configurations, SCDO currently operates with 4 shards, achieving significantly higher throughput than a single chain, and shards can be increased according to demand. At the same time, each subchain can also carry independent transaction loads. This architectural design gives SCDO elastic scalability to cope with future massive applications and user growth.
Question 18: How are SCDO's transaction throughput and speed?
Answer: Thanks to the parallel processing of sharding, SCDO's transaction throughput (TPS) is significantly higher than that of traditional single chains. For example, under multi-shard collaboration, the network can theoretically reach processing capabilities of thousands of transactions per second. Official data indicates that each shard currently stably handles about 250 TPS, totaling nearly 1000 TPS across 4 shards, and this can be further improved to a limit of about 2000 TPS as the number of shards increases in the future. In terms of transaction confirmation speed, SCDO's block time is about 20 seconds, a trade-off compared to Bitcoin's 10 minutes and Ethereum's early 15 seconds (slightly slower than Ethereum's single chain, but each shard produces blocks in parallel, resulting in overall higher efficiency). Generally, a transaction is packaged and confirmed within a block, completing initial confirmation in about 20 seconds. If higher security is needed, waiting for multiple block confirmations only takes a few minutes, far faster than Bitcoin's hour-long confirmation time. Therefore, SCDO exhibits high throughput and low latency performance, capable of supporting larger-scale commercial applications and real-time transaction demands.
Question 19: What is the level of SCDO's transaction fees (Gas fees)?
Answer: SCDO's transaction fees are quite low. Due to high network performance and capacity, the Gas fee for each transaction under normal load is negligible, with the minimum unit measurable to 8 decimal places. The official emphasizes that SCDO's transaction rates are far lower than those of Ethereum, making large-scale commercial applications and small payments possible. Users only need to pay almost negligible SCDO tokens as a fee for transferring or calling contracts on the SCDO chain, significantly reducing usage costs. The low fees stem from SCDO's efficient consensus and sharding design: improved processing capabilities and reduced congestion naturally lower the Gas price for each transaction. Additionally, SCDO currently does not burn transaction fees to destroy tokens, so the main function of the fee rate is to reward miners and prevent abuse, rather than to increase the burden on users. Overall, SCDO provides a high-speed, low-fee on-chain environment that is very friendly to support large-scale transactions and frequent interactions.
Question 20: How does SCDO maintain decentralization and security while improving performance?
Answer: SCDO breaks the traditional blockchain dilemma of 'performance-security-decentralization' through systematic design. On one hand, it innovates on the consensus mechanism by adopting the ZPoW algorithm to prevent power centralization, ensuring a large number of ordinary participants can also become miners, thereby maintaining network decentralization and consensus security. On the other hand, it chooses sharding and subchains as scaling solutions, which are scalability techniques that do not sacrifice security: on-chain sharding still uses the PoW consensus of the main chain, each shard independently maintains security and verifies each other through light chains, avoiding single points of failure; important states of the subchains are regularly submitted to the main chain, and the security of the main chain extends to ensure the safety of the subchains. At the same time, SCDO emphasizes code quality and auditing, making the underlying implementation reliable. The mixed PoW approach with multiple algorithms reduces the risk of 51% attacks (see the consensus mechanism section later), and by opening the community to attract global developers and nodes, SCDO has built a decentralized and trusted ecosystem while running at high performance. In short, SCDO does not exchange centralization for performance, but relies on technological innovation to achieve an optimal balance of all three.