Why Amaroo
Amaroo n. A beautiful place.
What we are building here lies on a blockchain foundation designed to scale. It is a network of chains designed to secure one another, extending to other ecosystems, making it possible to communicate between chains without relying on risky infrastructure or handing your assets to a custodian. The scalability was simply the last piece necessary to unlock the vision of a beautiful place.
A service that should just work
The idea of Amaroo was conceived back in 2017, in large part due to the problems that had begun to emerge in the crypto space. Chief among these was the friction or inability to build on new systems due to inherent limitations, one such being limited capacity, another being fragile infrastructure.
A note from Max Kaye, the founder, on the conception of Amaroo:
In my case, the limited capacity of Ethereum meant that I could not build any reliable services using Ethereum, because I had no certainty or assurance or reason to believe that these services would remain available at an affordable price.
While one can argue that the architecture of dApps can play a role to greatly reduce this burden, the position I found myself in was ultimately writing an entire new blockchain to run on top of Ethereum, in an attempt to provide the quality of service that I was looking for. This, I think we can all agree, is not a very good solution. One shouldn’t have to invent entire new technology layers to go between you and a service provider in order to make that service provider usable. The service should just work to start with.
In the land of blockchain, a large amount of focus has been on sending payments or financial speculation. For blockchain to reach its potential, and provide quality beyond payments, we need a new strategy for how we deal with capacity and with applications. These are the constraints under which Amaroo was conceived.
Creating a place together
One of the futures that await us is one of economic freedom. As good, free-thinking, virtuous people, will our legacy be one of creating something beautiful and unstoppable?
Amaroo is designed to enable you to build things that you could not otherwise build. The name embodies an idea: creating a place together that sustains the kinds of production and activity we want to see more of.
It’s a system for a future of finance where anyone on the planet can send money to anyone else on the planet without worrying about what happens in between. It doesn’t matter what currency those transactions are in: all of the conversions, the wallets, the chains, the cross-chain transactions and coordination - it’s designed so that all of that just happens and just works.
No blockchain is built on bridges
Scalability is not just your ability to have more happening on your chain. It’s your ability to interact with the world as well.
Bridges have become the preferred mechanism to connect chains and move value, given the ease of implementation. However, they brought back what blockchains set out to remove: custody.
Moving value between chains has typically meant placing your trust and your assets in something, or someone, in the middle. A custodian, an exchange, an operator, something that holds both sides. A committee of signers vouching for what happened from one chain to another. Many bridges do both: they hold your coin on one chain, and use a committee to vouch for it on another. Whatever the route, the weak point is the middle: value waits, and can be frozen, and is often the target for attacks.
Proof of Work blockchains tend to be the best: they are the cheapest to verify, because a header carries its own proof of work, with no sets of validator signatures to wait for and check external to the block. The Proof of Work block is, in a way, self-contained. Amaroo validates a foreign chain’s headers according to that chain’s own light client protocol.
The best way to transact across chains is a non-custodial solution. Say someone held Bitcoin and wanted to sell them for ROO on Amaroo’s DEX. The Bitcoin holder, in this case, must post collateral, which basically is the security deposit for completing the order. The person wants their collateral back as soon as possible, and so they’re incentivized to fulfill the order as soon as possible. And then once they do, they can just publish the SPV proof of that order (a proof that the payment happened), and it’ll automatically unlock their collateral. If the seller never pays, a timeout refunds the buyer, plus a share of that collateral.
That’s one of the reasons that Proof of Work matters, and one of the reasons that Proof of Work DEXes matter. And unfortunately, there are very few of them.
Amaroo’s answer
Amaroo’s answer is in the architecture, and Proof of Reflection. This is the mechanism that allows chains to check and record other chains’ block headers, and count their work when choosing between competing histories. Doing this mutually means a chain’s history can be seen in the blocks of others. Ultra Terminum is the multi-chain consensus strategy that uses Proof of Reflection to count work across chains, so the effort to create a block on one chain becomes useful on the chains it reflects, and other chains can use that block in their own work calculations.
Extending to foreign chains, Amaroo is designed to integrate the headers of other chains directly into its own context, so proofs against other chains’ block headers become a native operation. This gives rise to performing actions such as proofs of payment or proofs of reserve, without having to consult an oracle or rely on an external API. In this way, Amaroo is designed to offer cross-chain capabilities, natively.
The promise of Amaroo
The world and the economy that await those using Amaroo are ones of economic freedom, of reliability of blockchain services, of capacity of blockchain services. They allow anyone to create any kind of financial infrastructure that they need to, to support any of the kinds of protocols that they need to and any of the kinds of currencies that they need to. Now and forever.
This isn’t just because it’s built on Proof of Work. It isn’t just because it’s designed to scale. It isn’t just any one thing about Amaroo. It’s everything together that makes this future possible.
That’s how paradigm shifts happen. They don’t happen gradually. There is some gradual progress and change, but then a lot happens at once. And that’s not by accident: it’s because something was unlocked through a new combination of knowledge.
That is the promise of Amaroo. That’s why it was created. Because the blockchain ecosystem today will not get there on its own.