Cryptocurrency Code Review: Pchain

Disclaimer: These reviews are done as is from what is on display in the master branch of the repo’s made available. This review is not a comment on the overall project, scope, or success thereof. This was done as an educational review by me and any comments in the article are simply my opinion. It should not be used as any comment or advice on the project as a whole.

Review Date: 22/03/2018

“The first native multichain system that supports EVM in the world
Making large scale blockchain applications possible”

Let’s quickly talk about multichain. Right now Bitcoin and Ethereum are looking at side chains, these are technologies like Lightning, state channels, Raiden, Plasma, and dAppChains (Loom Network). We can clearly see that side chains are becoming more and more important. So what is a multichain? A multichain is where the sidechain is inherent to the underlying architecture. If one dApp starts scaling to fast, simply branch it off into its own side chain.

Looking at Ethereum, all of these different dApps are all isolated little islands, they don’t actually need to interact with each other unless they are bridging from the one to the next (normally done via exchanges in anycase), so the concept of multi chain scaling is definitely a smart move.

Sounds good, let’s jump into the github

21 commits, 1 branch, 3 contributors, last updated 2 months ago. Not off to a great start.

We jump directly into app/app.go

Interesting, this looks very familiar.

Looks very similar right?

Ok, so they are some kind of fork (copy) from Ethermint, Ethermint was an implementation of Tendermint to support Ethereum with Tendermint consensus. So essentially a PoS system with EVM support. Exactly like what PChain is promising in their whitepaper.

But ok fine, let’s go on, we already have the likes of PoA, Wanchain, Fusion who are all forks trying to bring something new to the game, let’s just hope it’s not another Ubiq or Ellaism.

Unfortunately for us, they didn’t actually do a clean fork, so I can’t track their actual changes (or lack thereof) so this is going to be tricky to debug.

So for the most part, where I see standard Ethermint, I am going to ignore and only look for specific files I see implemented by PChain.

Ok, here we go, all new, and this looks like it is the mainchain/sidechain implementations, very exciting!

So, not very exciting.

New folder, concensus (let’s ignore that for a moment).

More nothing.

And the rest is all Ethermint.

Conclusion: For now, I can’t really make any comment on the code or code quality (or lack thereof), it looks like they are only just now starting up. They aren’t claiming to have a PoC so this review is probably premature.

Let’s have a look again in about a month to see where things are.