The Future of MAD

Hi MadNet Community!

We are excited to provide this update after months of hinting at our progress. Out of respect for your time and attention to cultivating the MadNet Community, it was important for us to have our technology in a prolific place, additional projects underway, and a roadmap to outline in fuller detail.

First, a reminder of the problem we were looking to solve:

• Blockchains suffer a data availability problem — MadNet was created to be a general-purpose blockchain to solve this issue first and foremost.
• In an application-specific model of adoption and partnerships, it turns out that MadNet is perfect to solve many problems around PKI and decentralized certificate authorities. We are currently doing this with Verizon to secure their full transparency initiative. We are rolling out a set of tools to solve an issue with digital assets as well.
• The current Web3 / digital landscape uses self-attestation or Web2 corporate attestation (Twitter logins, etc.) to certify identity — these are fallible, vulnerable to scams, and fraught with unintended inaccuracies.
• We believe such an uncertain environment prevents any meaningful scale of Web3 anything.
• We think self-attestation is too insecure to rely on for large-scale interactions and transactions.
• We want to avoid relying on corporate entities that can change the rules governing verification and attestation at any time, thereby eliminating the core tenant of Web3: self-sovereign ownership.
• Bridging assets between public mainnets without collateral. (Entire new projects are focussing just on this, where it is a consequence of the tech MadNet built)

Our Solution

MadNet is secure data storage with compact proofs and strong availability guarantees. These two properties are mixed with the ability to easily build secure threshold cryptography (aka Multisig). MadNet has the basis to be the underlying utility layer to power everything from voting protocols to state channels to payment channels to bridges.

In layman’s speak, the MadNet blockchain uses cryptographic identity tools to coordinate automated business processes. Specifically, it’s a key-value store that manages complex PKI to drive coordination for programmatic workflows/automation. Its primary commercial objective as a Web 3 infrastructure technology is:

• To attach provable ownership of digital objects to protect intellectual property holders from fraud and to enable transactions between Web2 companies and the Web3 we all want to see come to fruition!

Secondarily, yet just as important to longer-term Web3 goals, the MadNet blockchain:

• Solves the data availability problem on EVM chains, specifically Ethereum
• Can interoperate between main nets.

Consequently, MadNet provides the infrastructure to power a common identity layer for the Internet to then become governed by industry consortia. In the media industry, for example, the governance of our pre-existing AdLedger (created in 2017 in anticipation of this endgame) can assure with certainty that Verizon, a MadNet client and AdLedger Board member, is indeed Verizon without relying on self-attestation.

The following is a more technical description of what MadNet does and what it solves:

MadNet acts as an ideal data-availability layer for several reasons.

First, the data structures of MadNet are based on a project named Google Trillian. Google built Trillian to make their actions as a Certificate Authority for SSL more easily auditable. The motivation was to reduce the risk of forging false identities and reduce the risk of hackers doing the same by hijacking Google infrastructure. We repurposed these same concepts to make MadNet more efficient in its operation and proofs of operation. This means we get the same benefits of the Google PKI infrastructure and also get the benefit of smaller proofs against maliciously-crafted blocks or transactions. This last point means it is cheaper and easier to accuse miners of bad actions.

Second, MadNet is built on a very clear data-availability model itself due to the implementation of ‘State Rent’ or the idea of paying for what you use in terms of storage. If you want to store a piece of data in the cloud, you are charged per Gigabyte-Month. This means you are charged for the same data being stored each month much like paying rent on an apartment. If you fail to pay, that data is removed after a grace period. MadNet operates much the same way in that nodes will store and serve data as long as rent is paid on the data. Once rent is no longer being paid for a piece of data, it is removed from the chain. This data may always be brought back by re-writing it or by using state proofs to show that it used to exist. Ethereum operates on an abusive pay-once store-forever model that has benefits but causes the price of running an Ethereum node to grow every single day (and increases sync times). Rather than fall victim to the same shortcomings, we built our system to operate similar to the proposed ideas of state rent in eth2.

Given the progress we’ve made with state rent, we believe we can help eth2 with this problem. Lastly, although MadNet is a UTXO-based chain, we do not use the same op-return storage mechanism as does Bitcoin. This method of storage was an ad hoc solution to the problem of storing unneeded transaction data in Bitcoin nodes.

Instead, we use an optimized pre-defined smart contract to enforce the rules of our data storage system. This smart contract allows for key-value lookup of data on a per-account basis and is a general-purpose tool that allows many other protocols and systems to be built on top of MadNet in a secure manner.

The Rebrand

It is important to us that this community be the first to know before it is made public:

We have made the decision to rebrand MadNetwork to AliceNet as the scope of Madnetwork’s impact has moved from “authentication toolkits for projects” to the fundamental authentication infrastructure for the internet as a whole. We’ve secured the domain alice.net which will be launching over the next few months.

As some of you may know, “Alice” has been a universal prompt in discussions and research papers around cryptographic systems and public key infrastructures since the late 1970s.

Rather than utilizing the symbols A, B, and C to stand in for points where sensitive, encrypted information travels, researchers in the field of cryptography have used the names Alice and Bob — as in, “Bob and Alice each have a secret, SB and SA, respectively, which they want to exchange.”

Our renaming to Alice also pays homage to a long history of moving toward a truly autonomous, decentralized Internet in which encrypted information can flow safely and swiftly, paving way for a narrative through which people can understand that Web3’s development is inevitable, and thus needs to be shaped by actors with the public’s best interests at heart — giving power to consumers and users, rather than solely the consolidated corporations reliant on extracting our data and usership.

Tokens, Staking, etc:

• The new token tickers will be announced when the hard launch of Mainnet with stakers goes live in June 2022.
• We will also take this opportunity to refactor the smart contracts from 2017 to be inline with the current staking environment.
• The current staking methodology for Alice, when it goes live, is that stakers earn ETH every time an enterprise needs to buy MadBytes to use the PKI, or data availability, or whatever other service. Validating node applications will come in the coming months.
• We are going to be changing the tokenomics to release additional tokens to stakers on a yield curve to incentivize staking, create an ecosystem fund, developer fund, and most importantly community participation fund. A governance model will be created for stakers/holders to vote on community issues/development.
• The circulating supply will increase very slowly; we believe this is the most effective, efficient, and secure method to attract liquidity into the ecosystem as major companies start to use the platform.
• This transition will happen between now and mid-June when MainNet 3rd-party validators + staking goes live.

New Partnerships & Comms

• Over the next few weeks we will be announcing exciting commercial partnerships that have been cemented with specific deliverables.
• In the coming two weeks, we will be announcing a new company, Valence, seeded by major investors and already commanding major clients, with the first project launching 4/7 and the second 4/15. This company utilizes the data availability layer as a layer2 ecosystem, delivering high-end digital assets for Web2 brands seeking effective Web3 expansions, focusing on sports, fine arts, and luxury fashion. This company will offer industry leaders and brands the opportunity to develop new metaverse experiences that truly reflect their aesthetics, including a commitment to visual and conceptual excellence and elegance. Many brands — both legacy and groundbreaking — do not see themselves reflected in the current iterations of metaverse explorations; we offer a meaningful alternative.
• Beginning in late April, we will create a new Telegram and or Discord server under the Alice moniker; we hope everyone from this group will join us in migrating there.

In the meantime, please reach out here with any questions, concerns, or points of clarification. We are grateful for this community, and stakeholder input and feedback remain central to our mission and success.