Infrastructure is the underlying factor that drives the development of Web3. Marlin Protocol enables developers to easily build innovative DApps and promote decentralization! Let’s learn more about Marlin Protocol through [Web3 Roundtable]

😍Introduction to Marlin Protocol

Marlin is a verifiable computation protocol. At a high level, it allows you to run trustless servers off-chain and verify the results of computations on-chain. This design is also colloquially known as a coprocessor. It allows you to outsource computations to someone else's machine while still guaranteeing that the results they return to you are correct. So instead of exposing all data and performing computations redundantly on a large number of machines like a blockchain, a coprocessor allows a single machine to execute programs in a way that ensures computational integrity and data confidentiality.

The advantage of this approach is that it enables new types of decentralized applications that were previously impossible due to high costs and slow speeds. - For example, the operation of AI models requires a GPU cluster on the chain, so AI coprocessors are needed. - In terms of games, currently it is either very simple on-chain games, also known as autonomous worlds.

On the other hand, the vast majority of Web3 games have their game servers centrally run by the project team itself. - Similarly, most games in DeFi are over-collateralized. Pseudo-anonymous accounts do not allow individuals to build their reputation through their on-chain activities, which could be used to expand undercollateralized loans or for more efficient airdrop programs.

Imagine if you could build completely trustless AI agents that update LTV or other risk parameters for DeFi protocols, run trading bots without the risk of the bot or operator running away with user funds, and have on-chain gaming environments that can dynamically update while supporting thousands of gamers just like a centralized game server. Marlin makes all of this possible.

🤩What needs does Marlin Protocol solve? What changes will these solutions bring to blockchain?

As we all know, blockchain has throughput limitations. This has led to many scaling innovations such as L2, rollups, parallel EVM, SVM, etc. However, these solutions also have their limitations.

- Most of them use block-based data structures. Therefore, you need to aggregate transactions into blocks that propagate at a certain frequency.

-These transactions are executed in a virtual machine designed for smart contracts. Therefore -there is a performance overhead. You can't have super low code execution latency and fast confirmation of correct execution.

-You need to write smart contracts in Solidity or a paradigm that conforms to the blockchain's native virtual machine.

- Cannot reliably use off-chain data.

Marlin allows computations to be performed off-chain, just like running in a normal cloud server. As a result, it executes very fast. You can code in any language (Python, Go, Rust). You can use existing libraries and frameworks (TensorFlow for ML, Unity for games). You can trustlessly access off-chain data and perform computations on it, whether it is weather data, price information from centralized exchanges, or blockchain history data. You can also use private data for these computations while ensuring that this data cannot be leaked or read by others.

Fundamentally, with Marlin, you can "decentralize" existing Web 2 applications without sacrificing performance. So over time, we hope you'll see more powerful DeFi applications with an experience comparable to centralized exchanges; on-chain games with latency and interactivity comparable to Web 2 games; and social applications using Marlin for smart recommendations.

🥳Introducing Marlin's two major breakthrough and innovative products: Oyster and Kalypso

When computing is outsourced to a decentralized cloud or third-party nodes, there are two main issues:

They will manipulate the program execution flow, resulting in incorrect results
They will snoop on your private data and may even leak it to other people

To solve this problem, there are several technologies that can perform verifiable computations. You may have heard of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), zero-knowledge cryptography or ZKPs, multi-party computation (MPC), and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). FHE is very slow, and there is a problem with MPC that nodes can collude without any observer knowing. Therefore, Marlin focuses on TEEs and ZKPs. TEEs are secure compartments inside the processor. They are like a vault inside the device's main processor, protecting sensitive data and code. The computations that take place within them are isolated from other processes.

Oyster is a network of node operators that provides TEEs. It is very cheap, fast, and practical for many crypto applications, and can be used to run automated or daemon bots, liquidation bots, matching engines that run trading platforms or game servers. Existing NodeJS servers can run in Oyster and HTTPS connections can be terminated in it, which makes it very suitable for decentralized front ends.

Kalypso, on the other hand, is a ZK proof marketplace. It is circuit agnostic. It supports private inputs. So any zk dApp, zkVM, or zkRollup can outsource proof generation to Kalypso. This improves liveness and censorship resistance of the protocol. It helps improve the user experience of zk applications, as client-side proof generation is time-consuming and can cause user devices to freeze.

😇What areas are the solutions provided by Marlin Protocol mainly applicable to? Do ordinary users have the opportunity to interact with the protocol?

At the end of the day, Marlin is a decentralized computing network, and many applications require high-performance computing. Today, due to computing limitations, dapps are designed in a way that they can either run entirely on-chain (and therefore have limited functionality) or rely on trusted parties to move key components off-chain. Verifiable off-chain computing networks open up a whole new paradigm for asynchronous programming.

For example

Oyster can be used in areas such as AI, MEV, deploying matching engines or order book exchanges.

The DAO could deploy a liquidation or MEV bot where MEV profits could be returned to the DAO.

Programmability can be brought to Bitcoin through coprocessors. In the field of decentralized frontends, Marlin's integration with 3DNS is very cutting-edge, as DAOs can own domains and deploy backend servers, and future variants will have more expressive and flexible features.

Not limited to any blockchain VM. No blockchain-like data structures have to be used. You can just code normally in any language and let people perform functions in a trustless and verifiable way. This is how the next generation of dApps will be deployed. Even existing dApps on L1 and L2 can use this feature to achieve functions that were not possible before.

😁What are Marlin Protocol’s future plans? How will it expand its influence?

We believe that decentralized computing networks will play a key role in powering decentralized services. AI-based use cases are just the beginning. We can consider using Oyster to develop coprocessors to bring programmability to Bitcoin. For Kalypso, we are exploring the possibility of refactoring using Symbiotic to reduce the security cost of the protocol. We encourage developers to try Oyster and Kalypso, participate in hackathons, and contact us if you need any kind of ecosystem support.