Gear Protocol: A Developer-Friendly Infrastructure Layer To Ease Web3 dApp Development

The implications of Web3 have been explored by legions of bloggers and news correspondents, but for now it remains a rather niche industry, with participation restricted to only the most enthusiastic proponents of decentralization. For sure, it takes time for new ideas to gain acceptance, there is also a strong argument that Web3's progress is being held back by its foundational technology. That's because the majority of Web3 dApps are built atop of a creaking Ethereum blockchain network that's plagued by numerous problems.

For instance, Ethereum is notorious for its inability to scale, with slow transaction speeds and high costs preventing mass adoption of Web3 applications. Its reliance on domain-specific development languages creates a high barrier to entry. In Web3, almost everything is based on EVM, forcing developers to learn Solidity, instead of using more familiar programming languages. This severely limits the available talent pool for Web3 development. Blockchains are further hindered by their complex and inefficient native consensus protocols, and there are major obstacles in the way of interoperability between blockchain networks. 

Another crippling issue with Ethereum and EVM is the complexity of its smart contracts, which are the key element of decentralized applications. Ethereum smart contracts are constrained by their inability to trigger "functions", forcing developers to rely on centralized services or external components to execute these electronic agreements. 

The Ethereum community's inability to solve these issues has opened the door to newer networks offering more innovative solutions. 

Accelerating Web3 

One project that's crying out for attention is Gear Protocol. It's based on Polkadot's Substrate framework, and its mission is to accelerate development in the Web3 community by lowering the barrier to entry for developers and enhancing its scalability. 

Gear was created by Nikolay Volf, formerly a senior engineer at Polkadot's parent company Parity Technologies, who set out to overcome the most crippling problems holding back early blockchain networks. 

With Gear, Volf has envisioned a platform that simplifies the development of fast and efficient, feature-rich dApps. By significantly reducing the barrier to entry for dApp development, Gear could potentially pave the way for the creation of thousands of new and experimental Web3 applications. 

Gear is notably backed by Dr. Gavin Wood, the creator of Polkadot and co-creator of Ethereum, who participated in its $12 million funding round in December 2021. The first project building on Gear is Vara Network, a standalone L1 blockchain also developed by Volf, which is currently live in testnet. Vara Network leverages Gear's unique functionality to provide a secure, efficient, scalable and high performance platform for deploying new Web3 dApps and migrating legacy Web2 applications. 

What's Special About Gear?

With Gear, blockchain interoperability is enhanced by a unique implementation of the Actor Model, which enables asynchronous messaging and parallel computation to make dApps built on Gear cross-chain compatible by default. While the standard Actor Model is not able to guarantee message ordering, Gear introduces some enhancements to ensure that the order of messages between two separate dApps is preserved. For instance, each Actor is isolated from the others, and does not share memory. It has a state that can only be changed when it receives a message. In addition, Gear's Actor Model guarantees scalability and fault tolerance.

In terms of smart contract functionality, the Actor Model's support for asynchronous messaging makes it possible to implement arbitrary logic with "delayed messages" that can wake the contract at a certain point in time, or in response to an event. This is a key capability of Gear that solves the problem of triggering functions, introducing new use cases for smart contracts. 

Developers may also be interested to learn that Gear doesn't require knowledge of Solidity to create smart contracts. That's because it supports WebAssembly, or Wasm, a portable binary-code format and a corresponding text format for executable programs, that makes it possible for web-based dApps to run in any browser using a multitude of programming languages. 

By using Wasm, Gear Protocol smart contracts can be compiled in any code and run at near-native speeds, translating to greater efficiency and lower transaction costs. With Gear, every dApp and smart contract is run as a Wasm program. In this way, developers can create highly performant, secure web applications and smart contracts in their preferred programming language, such as Rust, C, C++ and others. 

Another useful capability Gear provides is its persistent memory approach. Dapps running on Gear don't use storage because their full state is persisted instead, reducing the API surface for blockchain context. Persistent memory also avoids domain-specific language features, and allows for the use of complex programming language constructs. In this way, it further reduces the complexity for developers, with protocol memory management automatically matched with the underlying hardware and operating system. 

Gear Protocol offers some innovative solutions to blockchain's most pressing problems, but it's going up against numerous competing networks that have developed their own clever workarounds. Gear's biggest challenge now is to make itself stand out from the crowd. If it can get the attention it craves, it stands a good chance of paving the way for more developers to examine the potential of Web3.