Beginners Guide to Ignis: Ardor’s Eldest Child Chain
Ardor launched in January 2018 with an innovative parent-and-child structure designed to overcome the challenges of its predecessors.
However, to fully realize and showcase the benefits of Ardor as the parent, it was also necessary to launch a child chain. Thus, Ignis was born as the first child chain of Ardor.
This guide provides an extensive overview of Ignis, including:
- Company and Team
- About Ignis and Ardor
- Ignis Features
- The IGNIS Token
- Roadmap Progress
Company and Team
Both Ignis and Ardor are powered by a company called Jelurida. The company was established in 2016 by three co-founders.
- Kristina Kalcheva is a Director and Legal Expert with a Masters degree and seven years of experience in the field.
- Lior Yaffe is also a Director and one of the Core Developers for Ardor and Ignis.
- Yaffe has two decades of experience in implementing enterprise IT solutions for large companies.
- Petko Petkov is also a Core Developer bringing over six years experience in blockchain development.
Along with Ardor and Ignis, Jelurida also operates the Nxt blockchain. Aside from development efforts, the company also offers enterprises a customized setup of child chains on the Ardor platform, under the banner “Consensus-as-a-Service.”
Jelurida is based in Switzerland and operates across three continents.
About Ignis and Ardor
Nxt was around long before Ardor and even Jelurida. It launched in 2013 as the first-ever proof-of-stake blockchain and is still in operation today.
When Jelurida formed in 2016 and took over the operation of the Nxt blockchain, the company decided to develop a new blockchain platform that would overcome three major challenges of its predecessors.
Blockchain Bloat
Because all nodes need to store all transactions on any given blockchain, blockchain bloat inevitably becomes a problem by putting ever-increasing demands on the nodes operating the network.
Ardor reduces blockchain bloat by segregating tasks between the parent and child chains, and transaction pruning. Each transaction on a child chain is subject to pruning, which means only the cryptographic hash of its existence remains on the blockchain.
Full transaction history may be stored on archival nodes. In this way, the parent chain remains light, only storing transactions related to the balance of the proof-of-stake validators (called forgers.)
Single token
Most blockchains only operate based on their own native token. For example, on Ethereum, a developer can mint their own tokens, but all transactions demand gas fees in Ether.
In contrast, all of Ardor’s child chains, including Ignis, operate entirely based on their own token. Nodes called bundlers provide a conversion clearing service, accepting the payments from the child chain and paying the forgers on the main chain in Ardor’s ARDR tokens.
Customization
Jelurida found that when an enterprise needed a customized solution, simply cloning the Nxt blockchain for a custom implementation introduced a new set of problems. Most SME clients couldn’t afford the necessary setup for servers to process transactions, and the security of decentralization was inevitably compromised by having far fewer nodes running the network.
The parent-child architecture of Ardor allows anyone to set up a customized child chain and benefit from the security and decentralization of the parent chain.
So, Ignis is the first child chain of Ardor. It’s fully decentralized and offers unrestricted access to all features of the overall ecosystem. Whereas other child chains can be configured to user requirements, for example, restricting user permissions or disabling any particular feature, Ignis is fully functional and open to everyone. Although Ignis has its own token, IGNIS, which serves as an access token for the features of Ignis, any assets issued on Ignis are fully interoperable with all other child chain tokens.
Ignis Features
The features of Ignis are comparable to those of its predecessor, Nxt. There are over 25 separate functionalities, including a marketplace, voting system, exchange, and data cloud.
Most notable is that, for some specific features, Ignis serves as a facilitator across all child chains. For example, if someone wants to configure user accounts with specific settings or issue assets on their customized child chain, this is performed using Ignis rather than Ardor.
Although the full list of Ignis features is too numerous to describe each in detail, there are several worth highlighting.
Lightweight Smart Contracts
Smart contract transactions are generally executed like any other transaction, involving confirmation from each node and including state data from the blockchain, such as token balances. In contrast, lightweight smart contracts don’t require execution by all network nodes and are stateless. This means that users can rapidly configure and deploy a lightweight smart contract and easily update when required.
Furthermore, Ignis offers the opportunity to create customized lightweight smart contract templates that can be distributed for sale or for free via the Ignis marketplace.
Transaction and Account Controls
Ignis facilitates sophisticated account and transaction controls on other child chains. This feature enables child chain users to create composite approval models requiring multiple signatures for any given transaction, or to limit user accounts so that they can only approve transactions up to a particular value.
This feature is particularly useful for users setting up child chains for financial transactions. For example, if a child chain is set up as an exchange, it may require a human approver employed by the exchange to approve a withdrawal over $1000 in value as a security measure.
Privacy
Data stored on Ignis is generally public. However, it does offer a coin shuffling feature so users can shuffle an equal amount of tokens between newly-created recipient accounts, providing an additional layer of privacy. It also supports encrypted messaging. Messages can be securely shared with a third party by providing them with an encryption key.
The IGNIS Token
The IGNIS token provides access to all features of the Ignis blockchain and is used to pay transaction fees. There is a fixed supply of one billion IGNIS tokens in existence. Forty-four percent of these were sold at ICO in 2017, raising $15 million for the project. Of the remaining tokens, 50 percent were airdropped to anyone holding Nxt tokens at the time of the Ardor genesis block on January 1, 2018. The other six percent were retained by Jelurida.
Like most tokens, IGNIS performance tends to follow the overall crypto markets. Market cap spiked above $60 million over the summer of 2019 when Bitcoin hit its annual peak of $13k. As of January 2020, IGNIS market cap was around $20 million.
You can buy IGNIS tokens through Ardor’s own decentralized exchange. Alternatively, it’s also tradeable on 17 other platforms, including Bittrex, Changelly, Stex, and Upbit.
Storing IGNIS tokens outside an exchange account means downloading the dedicated Ardor wallet which allows any child-chain to be managed on. Additionally, Freewallet developed a dedicated Ignis wallet as well. Both are available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, and Android users.
Roadmap Progress
Jelurida has been consistent in delivering on the Ardor and Ignis roadmaps. 2019 saw the rollout of lightweight smart contracts, child chain account controls, and the setup of a child chain for Max Property Group, one of the biggest projects operating on Ardor.
Currently in development are some transaction pruning and archive retrieval features, and a hardware wallet integration.
Further developments are still in the research stage, according to the project website. These include secure voting, Java modules, and confidential node configuration.
Conclusion
The website states that Jelurida’s company mission is to make it “easier than ever to design, build, and implement custom decentralized applications on public platforms or as private, permissioned or hybrid solutions.” Together, Ignis and Ardor together are going a long way to achieving that mission.
Ardor does all the infrastructural work of ensuring that the platform performs, while Ignis provides the ability for individuals or enterprises to cherry-pick the features and functionality that work for their particular use case.
Many projects talk about reducing barriers to entry. However, Ardor and Ignis actually bring that vision to life. If the project can gain traction, particularly among an enterprise audience, it has a strong chance of outpacing the competition.
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