Cherry Network Strategy Update
The team shares thoughts about past progress and the next steps to bring the Cherry Vision to fruition
When Cherry was founded in late 2019, the team’s vision was to contribute to a future based on fair, uncensored access to storage, finance, freedom, and security. Our project, the broader industry, and the world have changed significantly in the years since. The tenets of freedom underpinning our project have, however, become more relevant than ever, as has our resolve to advance them.
While the industry continued to slide headlong into yet another crypto winter, the Cherry Network team and community were busy building products. We have never felt more optimistic about Cherry’s future; this post will attempt to explain why.
The Web3 promise failed in 2022
If Web1 was the Internet of individual static websites, and Web2 was the Internet of centralized platform companies, Web3 promises an Internet where users are in control, and they become the true owners of the platforms and services they use. Blockchain is the purest expression of the Web3 vision, embodying the principles of decentralization, self-sovereignty, fairness, and freedom. However, recent events have betrayed these principles.
In 2022, the general public’s trust in crypto experienced its steepest decline. Much of that decline can be attributed to companies not adhering to the ideals of Web3. The disastrous events that occurred directly resulted from their betrayal of the values we hold dear. These centralized companies did not believe in a level playing field, self-custody, or even basic decentralization, and their collapse caused great damage. As a result, many now view the entire industry as unreliable and untrustworthy.
Decentralization is at the heart of Web3. To truly embrace its promise, it must be the uncompromising core of everything a project does. Systems that are fully open-sourced, keep all activity on-chain, preserve self-custody, are community-owned, and are trustless and permissionless are designed to prevent fraud and counterparty risk and ensure the highest levels of transparency and accountability for all parties involved.
Virtually none of the players that melted down in 2022 valued those Web3 principles. The ecosystems that do are still alive and building a better future for us all, especially Cherry. The Cherry community has seized this opportunity to double down on the project’s core tenets in the wake of the storm and on the path to mass adoption and will continue to do so.
Cherry’s Promise for 2023 and Beyond
The first step toward true decentralization is transparency. By design, Cherry is a transparent organization fully accountable to its community members. We host weekly project updates regularly featuring core team members Herman Jacobs (a.k.a. Seraphim) and Eoghan Gannon, who thoroughly detail our team’s work, aspirations, and considerations about the industry and broader events that can affect Cherry’s operations. We believe that this practice is especially valuable in the context of a small project executing big plans in a rapidly changing environment, such as in the crypto industry, as well as in response to macroeconomic or geopolitical trends: as stewards of the community, we need to account for local issues directly affecting our project such as engineering and business development, but also varied domains such as competition, (potential) customers, market appetite, liquidity, access to credit, and treasury management to mention a few.
All this and more goes into our leadership’s decision-making. Our goal is to transparently provide this information and add nuance to the complex problems we confront daily, and perhaps receive feedback and suggestions from our community.
All this brainstorming and continuous priority adjustments led us to focus on building products and developing core frameworks to enable new consumer-facing decentralized Web3 applications on top of Cherry. Consequently, we significantly reduced our investment in ecosystem development and outside partnerships. These are cash-intensive enterprises with uncertain returns that are subject to significant external risks. On the other hand, investing in our core will make the Cherry platform more usable, cutting integration costs and reducing the investment required for ecosystem expansion in the long run.
As part of this focus on the core Cherry Vision, business development will also be emphasized. The pieces are in place to get Cherry’s functionality into the hands of the development community, and marketing is being ramped up with the assistance of our community and partners.
What to Expect?
Despite our pivot away from ecosystem expansion and into a focus on our core, the past months have been eventful at Cherry, to say the least! We upgraded the network to a layer-zero infrastructure in December 2022 and developed an EVM-compatibility parachain that was then deployed on testnet and is on track to be launched on our Cherry Network mainnet within a few weeks. We performed bug fixes, maintenance, and regular upgrades to the codebase that increased its stability and performance. Our core work isn’t limited to protocol upgrades either! We have developed a variety of tools that will be launched soon. Here is a partial list of products and efforts you can expect to come to fruition shortly:
Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility Parachain (pEVM)
Since its foundation, Cherry aimed to be a purpose-specific blockchain network that delivers trustless decentralized storage in a native virtual environment. We have, however, noted that this native environment, while highly optimized and efficient, requires a learning curve that most decentralized application developers are not willing to undertake. This places an important gap between developers and our native storage product. To fill it, we originally began working on interoperability channels that could facilitate communication across the most used general-purpose networks (like Ethereum, Polygon, BNB Chain, Solana, etc.) and Cherry.
Upon further analysis, however, we concluded this was an imperfect solution requiring degrees of trust and access-point centralization that we felt contradicted our core tenets. We could do better, and that is the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility Parachain (or pEVM). It is a separate blockchain network deployed as a parachain on the Cherry Network relay chain. Its core feature is its full compatibility with the Ethereum-based toolkits, environment, and, most importantly, networks that still host most smart contract activity.
The use cases unlocked by the pEVM are loosely grouped into the following opportunity areas:
- Data onboarding & management: e.g., tools automating storage deal-making to unlock use cases like perpetual storage
- Data curation & monetization: e.g., tools facilitating the collective creation, curation, and monetization of valuable datasets
- Decentralized finance: e.g., to provide access to collateral for the thousands of storage providers offering services on the network and to create new opportunities for token-holders to participate more actively in the Cherry economy
- Network participant discovery and analytics: e.g., storage provider reputation services or data retrievability oracles that create differentiation opportunities and may enhance the reliability of the decentralized cloud for its users
- Integration, interoperability, and other services: e.g., cross-chain bridges to integrate with other economies or NFT standards with built-in storage guarantees, developer tooling, and more
Due to the recombinant nature of EVM-powered use cases and Web3, businesses may cut across several of these opportunity areas. These opportunities represent markets with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue potential.
EVM Indexer / Explorer
No network can be easily accessible by layman users without an intuitive user interface to display its activity. For this reason, we have deployed an EVM indexer/explorer based on Blockscout to Cherry Networks Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility Parachain (pEVM) already launched on testnet. Once the same parachain is live on mainnet, the same interface will allow users to explore both EVM testnet and mainnet environments. Check it out here:
SS58-H160 Address Converter
This temporary tool is necessary to derive substrate-format public keys (SS58) from user Ethereum-format public keys (H160). Documentation on its use will be available on Cherry Network’s Documentation. In the meanwhile, you can check it out here:
Cherry Network Staking Dashboard
The Cherry Network Staking Dashboard is a tool dedicated to staking your $CHER and nominating validators seamlessly with the security wallet injection so your private keys can never be leaked.
[In development]
Web Wallet
Ultimately, we need a way for layman users to transfer $CHER and access features such as storage, cryptographic tools, and more in a single, simple interface. The Cherry Network web wallet aims to be the central entry point for all standard user interaction with the Cherry Network relay chain and its parachains.
[In development]
Cherry Network x Polkadot
Cherry Network is based on the Substrate development stack and shares most foundational code with Polkadot, a renowned general-purpose relay network and dynamic blockchain development community.
As is common practice in open-source software, we have liberally borrowed and leveraged technologies built by Polkadot, its parachains, and those otherwise funded by the Web3 Foundation (an affiliated non-profit entity). We plan to begin contributing back to the Polkadot network with the specialized features built by our team over the past years of development and eventually host a Cherry Network parachain on Polkadot proper.
We would like to feature some exciting technologies spearheaded by the Polkadot community that Cherry Network either already has or will begin supporting:
- Asynchronous Backing is an optimization to parachain consensus with the potential to allow substrate-based relay networks to process upwards of 1 million transactions per second, representing a new peak of throughput for the industry. Follow the Github issue.
- XCM, Polkadot’s standard for cross-chain and cross-consensus communication, began rolling out v3, unlocking bridges to external networks, NFT exchanges, improved programmability, and more. More info here: XCM v3: Breaking New Ground for Web3 Interoperability.
- Parathreads allow developers to launch blockchains on relay networks such as Polkafod or Cherry Network while bypassing the parachain auction process, significantly improving the ease and flexibility of deployment options. Check out this post for more information: Polkadot: Blockspace over Blockchains.
- Ink! is the WASM-based smart contract language native to Substrate-based smart contract virtual machines. Its developers released an important upgrade in February with an end-to-end testing framework. Data reported by Dotinsights revealed that some 2,500+ smart contracts are already written in ink! already deployed across the Polkadot ecosystem. More information about Ink! can be found on their website or Twitter.
The Cherry Network team is proud of its association both in spirit and in our work with the Polkadot community. Polkadot has become the largest and most diverse ecosystem of purpose-built layer-1 blockchains and apps and the only one fully secured by a shared, network-wide validator set and benefiting from secure, trustless cross-chain interoperability. Polkadot parachains and DApps span the full spectrum of what’s possible with blockchain technology, from use cases for social media to supply chain, identity, gaming, tokenized real-world assets, carbon credits, privacy, robotics, IoT, and much more. We hope to add trustless decentralized storage to this list soon…
Onwards and Upwards
Cherry Network is more than any one person or entity. It’s a community that will outlive us all. This bear market has been a fantastic opportunity for all of us to improve the Cherry Network and contribute to the broader Web3 space without the noise that comes with over-hyped bull markets.
Our core engineering team and supporting community members have built impressive technology — we now need to tell the world about it. We must spread the word and expand our communication efforts. As we mature our own strategy, we’d love to hear suggestions and feedback from our community!
Get involved!
There are many ways to get involved with the Cherry Community, whether you’re a large or small investor, a developer, or a creator who wishes to join the Cherry Ecosystem.
We have just launched the Cherry Network Mainnet, the first decentralized software connecting web3 to trustless file storage. Leverage the unique capabilities of the Cherry infrastructure, and build decentralized applications like never before. Potential partners interested in a trustless, business-ready interface to decentralized file systems can contact us via our social channels or hello@cherry.network to learn more. Among the opportunities is a spot in our Cherry Labs program, where we incubate innovative startups who build on the Cherry stack.
Join the Cherry Community
If the Cherry mission of providing truly trustless distributed file storage for decentralized applications speaks to you, get in touch! Read our Cherry Lightpaper, and review our Technical Documentation to delve deeper into the Cherry stack.
We’ve brought together a community of technologists, artists, and creators, and we want you to get involved. We invite you to join our growing community if this speaks to you.
Follow the official Cherry social media accounts, stay up-to-date with all our news and announcements, and subscribe to the newsletter.
To learn more about Cherry, visit Cherry.Network
