Decentralised user-driven free markets and verification networks
The most fundamental ideas behind Saline are fairly general and can in fact be applied way beyond the frontiers of the crypto industry. A great number of use cases from various industries and horizons seem to lend themselves very naturally to Saline’s approach, and typically “only” require changing the type of state and transactions maintained by the chain.
We will first look at what those versatile ideas are, before diving into a series of use cases and applications that lend themselves extremely well to being implemented with Saline’s approach.
Core ideas
What is the main theme of Saline? A story of user-supplied rules that govern changes to some decentralised ledger state which can evolve by submitting transactions. Transactions can come in various shapes and with various pieces of data attached, all of which can be used in the rules to express our constraints.
No smart contracts. “Code is law” in Saline as well, but where each user writes the law that applies to their entry of the ledger, and 99% of the time they do not need to actually write any code. When a rule does not explicitly require the owner’s signature, third parties (“solvers”) can submit transactions that fulfil the conditions stated in the rule, without the involvement of the owner or the need to establish a trusted relationship. Otherwise, the owner must at the very least cooperate to produce valid transactions against their leger entry.
The blockchain network maintaining that decentralised ledger then proceeds to group batches of valid transactions into blocks and establishes consensus over their validity. Validators and solvers are then suitably rewarded for their work off of transaction fees and tips. The exact consensus protocol used doesn’t matter, except for the fact that this mechanism involves users, solvers, block producers, block proposers and validators, and one needs to make sure that the incentives of all those actors are sufficiently aligned.
Our initial efforts are focused on shipping this exact vision. Our long term plan however involves exploring variations on this theme, where we instantiate our paradigm with different types of state (“ledger”) and operations (“transactions”) for the chain. Let’s first look at a couple of crypto use cases that are either new or particularly well suited to Saline’s approach, before looking beyond our industry.
Crypto applications
Beyond supporting various single or multiple signature schemes, basic transfers and swaps, Saline’s paradigm already provides new kinds of applications, or new spins on existing ones. Let’s look at a few below.
Service-as-a-Wallet
AMM, Index fund, … intent templates give the possibility to open a “service” on your wallet in a few clicks. Power users with fancy requirements can use Saline SDKs in Go, Rust, Python or any other popular language to automate intents and transactions around a wallet or a whole fleet of them.
Of particular interest is the idea that individual users as well as organisations could provide a decentralised “sea” of AMMs and various other services and instruments, where no single user would have to worry about finding the right venue, checking the reputation, liquidity and solvers would compete to fulfil this sea of intents.
Atomic, peer-to-peer swaps/settlements
Alice and Bob can swap/settle any assets without having to trust each other, risk-free. No bug-ridden or malicious smart-contract intermediary. Alice sends a precise settlement intent to Bob over their favourite communication medium (Whatsapp, Telegram, …), Bob imports it in his wallet and submits the only transaction allowed by the intent, batched with the installation of Alice’s intent.
This generalises well to Alice sending her intent to a group or the entire world.
Payment infrastructure
You do see a lot of centralised exchanges/providers offering crypto payment solutions from the likes of Binance and Coinbase as well as traditional fintech like Stripe. With the intent and cross-chain capabilities of Saline, a universal crypto-payment solution is waiting to be built. Merchants and applications can integrate seamlessly through API calls and our SDKs, to accept payments ranging from Bitcoin, USDC, USDT, and much more. All while staying in control of the currency and logic, secured by a decentralised network. Eg. Please pay 1 BTC to this wallet in the next 2 hours to confirm your order today. This can be done through regular transfer or just scanned QR code which is common among Asia countries (Paynow-Singapore, Alipay-China, Promptpay-Thailand, Paytm-India).
This could even be further extended to on & off-ramp. With the right local partner, bridging between traditional and crypto currencies. Eg. Send 1,000 THB to this bank account in the next 10 min, and 30 USDC will be onboarded to your wallet. This could also be an on-off ramp via P2P like an escrow, Ex: If the wallet receives 1000 THB and 30 USDC in the next 30 min then settlement happens, otherwise we refund.
Centralised exchanges, trustless edition
Users and centralised exchanges can have a trustless relationship on Saline, around simple instruments or complex ones. The exchange and users can agree on terms and commit to the corresponding intents, allowing the exchange to run their high-performance centralised infrastructure to crunch user orders and perform batched settlements on-chain. Since both the exchange and the user committed to their intents, the only valid execution is one where the terms of their deal is respected, on both sides. Neither party can run away with assets. On-chain data slots for asset prices are used in both intents to govern liquidation (user -> exchange) and yield earning (exchange -> user) transactions.
Generalised crypto derivatives
Our intents can naturally express derivatives. To be precise, derivatives are a subset of Saline intents; Saline intents don’t necessarily have to refer to the price of assets, in particular all the signature related rules. But when they do, and have the right shape, they de facto express a derivative.
Saline intents/derivatives of the right kind could therefore be held and traded like their underlying assets. The rules specified by the intents would dictate the exact conditions of the contract. Any specific regulatory constraint could be enforced “by construction”, e.g imposing global rules over some instruments. Any user could create and sell verifiable derivatives.
Beyond cryptocurrencies
Let’s now play a game. Let’s take out or make optional the crypto assets ledger and everything cryptocurrency related in Saline. Allow the state and transactions to be arbitrary data, unrelated to digital assets. All while keeping the overall shape of a decentralised blockchain with addresses owning things (state) and the ability to alter them (transactions) under the supervision of user-supplied rules (intents).
What do we get? What can we do?
Real world assets
The RWA use case has gathered a lot of attention over the years, justifiably so given the vast quantity of such assets circulating in the world. Does Saline “apply” naturally to real world assets as well?
The short answer is yes. We saw earlier that the notion of ownership needed for Saline to make sense is quite flexible. The complexity of this use case most definitely resides in the onboarding and offboarding aspects.
In a crypto setting, moving assets left and right is somewhat easy. Most chains are publicly accessible and observable, which makes the development of cross-chain infrastructure possible.
For real world assets, we would need something similar to a bridge, but proving the existence (and ideally the “locking”) of the said physical assets. In a world like ours, this likely means that some kind of authority would have to “be the bridge” and cryptographically certify the authenticity of claims about any onboarded asset, while releasing the assets upon receiving legitimate redeeming requests. All backed by suitable regulation and insurance.
Competitive food market
Ever dreamed of having your favourite pizza places compete for your order? Place an order by installing a suitable intent. Possibly including different types of food. Restaurants (or individuals?) advertise their menus through intents as well. Solvers match orders to (potentially combinations of) restaurants, with validated transactions notifying restaurants and clients, effectively “placing” the order.
Decentralised identity
Any application making use of decentralised identity, whether through a proof of jurisdiction or the selective disclosure of personal information could e.g make use of ZK proofs of identity (à la Polygon ID) and guard the use of some services with suitable constraints on the identity (e.g EU specific services), right from the intent. Only transactions complying by these rules would be considered valid.
Censorship-resistant game tournaments
Keep basic assets in chain state to pay prize money to participants, but augment with ability to declare and compete in tournaments of e.g chess.
Intents to declare tournaments and desire to participate, respectively describing the entire tree of games and payout structure, participation conditions on one hand, and constraints on desired format and payouts on the other.
Transactions to start, evolve and close tournaments
Could require a game’s moves to be signed by both players (like the usual physical game sheets they sign) in order for a game result transaction to be valid
Payout transactions could by construction only happen upon completion of a full tournament
What else?
These are probably just the tip of the iceberg. Part of the future work will consist in establishing exactly how far the ideas take us, and developing a proper theory to characterise the behaviour of our platform.
Did you think of other use cases while reading this post? Please get in touch at contact@saline.network.
Conclusion
The generic framework covered in this post will emerge out of the development of the initial vision of Saline, described in our whitepaper. There is a lot to explore and implement. For instance, the most performance sensitive use cases could require a “DAG sidechain” version of Saline, for which some research has already been done.
We hope that the community will play a significant role in unrolling this story with us, from established or new crypto users trying out our simple and powerful wallets, to advanced users and developers building successful applications and services, or even helping us deploy Saline’s ideas beyond the realm of cryptocurrencies.
