Pegging a private chain to Ethereum public blockchain

Question

Are there any good tutorials or resources for sidechain development or are these just specialized private chain pegged to the Ethereum network?

Answer 1

There are more resources coming on line If your looking for a private block-chain, for example your own sidechain on ETH with and a choice of consensus, look at Ark with its modular plugin system. Ark uses what it calls "smart bridges" to connect to a public ETH,to provide services or even act as interfaces for other third-party services. Its most developed sdk is javascript.

see ark for a detailed tech outline to the stack, they have a cookbook with code snippets there as well

Answer 2

There are no tutorials, because the state of the art is still in Research & Development and nobody has deployed a true sidechain yet.

As far as I know, at the moment there is no decentralized way to set up sidechains. For example, one of the most popular projects Rootstock (RSK) is using a "federation" e.g. centralized wallet do to the pegging.

https://faq.rsk.co/en/main/ (see: Federation)

Work-in-progress projects include

• Cosmos

• Polkadot

• Plasma - could not really find a better link to report the state of the progress than this one https://blog.omisego.network/construction-of-a-plasma-chain-0x1-614f6ebd1612

Answer 3

Rootstock side-chain allows users to use smart contracts with bitcoin. you convert your "btc" to "rbtc" to interact with the smart contracts.

From here

The RSK platform is a language based protocol Solidity it works like a side chain running in parallel to the Bitcoin blockchain. This protocol is based on a bidirectional communication that operates as a bridge to connect both chains. In this way, it allows the Bitcoin network to assist RSK in its execution. That is why the native currency or token of the RSK platform is the RSK smart bitcoin (RBTC), which has a 1: 1 ratio with the original currency of the Bitcoin network, bitcoin (BTC).

Thanks to the functionality of this platform, today it is possible to enjoy decentralized applications (DApps) and complex smart contracts within the Bitcoin network, much like they occur within Bitcoin networks. Ethereum, EOS and others. But with all the security and robustness that the Bitcoin blockchain enjoys thanks to its great computing power.

• Polygon is a side chain for ethereum.

Answer 4

Wwhy would one need an ethereum sidechain if ethereum is turing complete? That just makes little sense. It's not a scalability conversation, that's a stupid way of scaling. It's the equivalent of fixing something with duct tape.

For a blockchain like bitcoin it makes somewhat sense because it can extend functionality of the protocol but even then there's issues. Atomic swap is nothing but a fancy word for an automated escrow and there's big potential hazards like centralization (see LN hubs), fraudulent swaps, ... . Not to mention it's only possible through local daemon.