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HUMAN Protocol brings distributed marketplaces to Moonbeam
Human Protocol powers a blockchain-based distributed marketplace, in which humans are compensated for contributing their reasoning and skills to the network. Hundreds of millions of people already interact with HUMAN Protocol via the hCaptcha service, and we are excited to bring the underlying technology to a broader audience via Moonbeam & Polkadot.
Polkadot enables blockchain networks to work together seamlessly. At the centre of the Polkadot software is the Relay Chain, a permanent chain with deliberately limited functionality, responsible primarily for the security and coordination of parachains. The parachains are infrastructure or application-specific blockchains in their own right, with their own logic and features, that connect to the Relay Chain and thereby access the capacity to share information with other blockchains in ‘parallel,’ as well as deriving security from the overall Polkadot validator network.
One of the main issues we encounter with many blockchain technologies is scalability — Polkadot addresses this head-on.
Heterogenous sharding is a concept unique to Polkadot. The parachains are ‘shards’ of a larger dataset; that they are heterogeneous simply means their connection to one another is not dependent upon uniformity of purpose. Some parachains will focus on specific features, such as smart contracts, privacy or scalability, while maintaining the ability to communicate effective transaction information with other parachains in the network.
Moonbeam is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform on the Polkadot network that makes it easy to build natively interoperable applications. This Ethereum compatibility allows developers to deploy existing Solidity smart contracts and DApp frontends to Moonbeam with minimal changes.
Moonbeam is built on Substrate, a blockchain building framework, which is the primary framework developers use to build on Polkadot. While Substrate forms a powerful layer in the tech stack, migrating can add complexities for existing DApp developers who would need to either build their own blockchain on Substrate, or re-write their existing smart contracts to ink! and deploy to a Wasm smart contract platform. Through Moonbeam, developers can deploy unchanged smart contracts using familiar Ethereum tools with Web3 RPC and EVM implementations as a viable means of deploying to Polkadot. Moonbeam also provides a long-term path for projects to become their own parachains, if desired.
As with all parachains on the Polkadot network, Moonbeam transactions are aggregated and written to the Relay Chain to provide shared security. This configuration allows all chains to benefit from the interoperabilty, speed, and community of Polkadot, while taking advantage of much faster migration and launch capabilities.
Moonbeam is currently active through Moonbase Alpha, their TestNet.
Human Protocol Foundation will be launching on Polkadot using the Moonbase Alpha, which allows us to explore a dynamic and potentially more rapid transition to the network. This enables us to launch a contract on Moonbase Alpha testnet, and perform Eth/ERC-20-compatible labeling on-chain. We have done this work open source, and have added the code to our GitHub, and it is available for the community to test, implement and extend. As we have shown, it’s quite easy to get started. You can also find an open source Moonbeam patch in our Github, adding support to HMT Escrow.
Human Protocol on Moonbeam: Launch data labeling jobs on CVAT , an open source web tool for image and video annotation that’s used for labeling data for computer vision algorithms.
One thing enabled by the faster infrastructure potential presented by Moonbeam and Polkadot is to make the number of tasks in a job smaller, and to break up what we are doing into smaller jobs.
Moving to this newest interface, we are excited to demo how people can use Moonbeam to launch a new job on CVAT while taking advantage of the Human Network:
Starting today, anyone can access the code, which is available on our GitHub.
https://github.com/hCaptcha/hmt-escrow/pull/250
A fundamental roadblock to the wide-scale deployment of blockchain technology is the scalability and interoperability limitations of legacy networks. Ethereum could not effectively run the high-volume transactional work implied by HUMAN Protocol; not only is gas for Ethereum prohibitively expensive, the mainnet simply could not fulfil our volume of transactions.
Transitioning to another platform is often difficult due to the work involved. However, the Ethereum compatibility offered on the Moonbeam parachain solves this and means that
Transactions: While HUMAN Protocol will execute on Moonbeam, Polkadot allows us the flexibility to launch our own parachains to optimize for speed and handling large transaction volumes. No longer is the network limited by the inevitable ‘bottle-neck’ of high-volume transactions on legacy technologies.
Economic: Polkadot allows a common set of validators, to finalize transactions to the Relay Chain, providing shared security to all parachains, resulting in an unprecedented capacity for economic scalability.
HUMAN Protocol is already running on the Ethereum testnet, but the performance and feature limitations of Ethereum (both 1.0 and 2.0) mean that supporting other options is valuable for Protocol users. Not only will Moonbeam demonstrate the true potential of the Protocol through increased transaction speed, but, by opening the doors to the Polkadot network, it will allow for much faster open-source buildout and extension of job interfaces to search, list, and find new types of work through the Protocol and its human labor pools, retaining compatibility with our ongoing roadmap.
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Legal Disclaimer
The HUMAN Protocol Foundation makes no representation, warranty, or undertaking, express or implied, as to the accuracy, reliability, completeness, or reasonableness of the information contained here. Any assumptions, opinions, and estimations expressed constitute the HUMAN Protocol Foundation’s judgment as of the time of publishing and are subject to change without notice. Any projection contained within the information presented here is based on a number of assumptions, and there can be no guarantee that any projected outcomes will be achieved.
