Komodo 2.0 in Simple Words
by jl777
25 March 2018

The security alone is enough to justify it as assetchains need to be secured, but now that it exists it turns out to enable smartchain combos where multiple smartchains can all be combined into a combined set of chains that are all able to validate consensus in the other chains, relying on the notarized MoM (Merkle root of Merkle) data.

KMD is the repository for all the MoM notarizations. So on the KMD chain (secured by BTC notarization) is a record of MoM that spans all the notarizing chains block's merkle roots.

Each block has a merkle root that allows for any txid in that block to be verified, given the merkle root and an SPV proof. So, if you have the raw txbytes, you can validate the txid and if you have the SPV proof, you can validate that the txid is in that block. This is standard SPV validation.

Take it one step further.

Now we have notarizations happening every so often. In each a MoM is added, which is the merkle root of merkle roots for all blocks from that notarization height backwards to the previous notarization. Just as you can verify that a txid was in a block, we can therefore verify that a block with a specific merkle root was notarized! So combine it with being able to validate any transaction happened in a specific merkle root and we get that we can validate that a specific transaction happened on a specific chain. And, it can be any chain that is notarized, and all this info is in the KMD chain.

Once you can comprehend the above, you will realize that this totally solves the scalability issue of smart contracts.

Without using some untested massively complex and hard to understand new tech. It builds on proven SPV validation. SBV I guess, simple block validation. Validate a tx happened in a block and validate that that specific block was notarized in a specific blockchain.

The other shoe that is needed to understand is that each smartchain can have one or more special evaluation functions that can be literally anything you can write code to validate. Can be about mutating kittens, or whether a certain address did a certain transaction, whatever can be coded into a true/false evaluation funtion. The CC (Crypto Contracts) script can be based on that.

So, we get BTC secured cross chain CC scripts with arbitrary chain specific evaluation functions. No sharding needed as all data for each smartchain only exists on that chain. So, while all the other platforms struggle to implement these crazy complicated whitepaper solutions, we are debugging the simple scaling solution.

The paper for it will be written after it is completed, but it wont be very long as it is building on notarization security, CC and SPV validation which already has a lot of history.

Well, already during implementation we went down one road. Found an insoluble flaw and had to backtrack.

This is why I like to be a simple C programmer. No need to figure out really complicated whitepapers, just the simplest solution that does the job.