Callisto Network vision

6 min readApr 29, 2022

This article describes the ideology of the Callisto Network project as well as it’s successful aspects, experience and further goals.

Initial vision: testground for ETC ecosystem

Callisto Network was designed, funded and launched as a sub-project of Ethereum Commonwealth with the initial goal of researching experimental improvements of Ethereum protocol that could be proposed to ETC afterwards.

In the past years we did everything that we originally planned. Anyone can find the links above to find my proposals that have been submitted to ETC for the experimental improvements we originally announced as a goal of Callisto launch.

All the experimental improvements to Ethereum protocol that we’ve made were proposed to ETC and got rejected by ETC moderators. As the result, we decided that the original goals of the Callisto Network project are achieved and we need to pick a new development direction.

The goal of the project: Security DAO

The main goal of the project was to enhance the security of crypto industry. We witnessed TheDAO hack with all the consequences. We witnessed numerous other hacks. We all agree that this hurts the adoption of the “better financial system” a lot and this should never happen again.

The main goal of Callisto was to develop a solution to this problem or at least improve the situation. We started a Security Department that was auditing third party projects for free. Then we promoted security practices used by our security department and offered other projects to use the Treasury + Security DAO structure to allocate a portion of their emission for the improvement of ecosystem security.

This was not enough however — as we can observe the adoption of security improvement model is very low. Security Department of Callisto proves to be efficient enough.

It was originally intended to be turned into a DAO that could operate autonomously. We faced a number of issues that prevented us from implementing the original idea of Security DAO and therefore we didn’t achieve this goal until now.

In the past years based on the experience of Security Department of Callisto I decided to give up the idea of placing the burden of responsibility for the improvement of security of DAPP ecosystems on Sec.Dep solely. As the paradigm of security engineers says “Nothing can be perfectly secure but you can introduce multiple layers of security to overcome the consequences of a breach”. It was decided to develop an Insurance Department that would operate on top of the Security Auditing Department and therefore create an additional level of security.

Insurance Department is a promising feature that can be developed and promoted by Callisto Network but it is still not implemented.

Unique features: security, cold-staking, governance

Security Department of Callisto Network

While Security Department did not solve the issue of smart-contract hacks and did not became a reference prototype of “DAO that can solve the problem of hacks” — it still contributed to the security of smart-contracts mostly on Ethereum chain. We performed over 400 security audits which is the highest amount in the whole industry.

Not even a single security auditing company has the same number of smart-contracts audited.

Cold-Staking

Cold Staking proves to be one of the most successful features of Callisto Network so far. It evolved significantly since its first iteration. Cold Staking idea is based on gym markets theory. This theory states that mechanisms that force people to lock their coins for a significant period of time in exchange for % reward is a net beneficial financial tool for the whole ecosystem. This principle is proven to be working perfectly.

Cold Staking code is used as a base for newer implementations. For example SOY Staking is based on Cold Staking mechanisms.

Any ERC223 token can be made stake-able with almost the same code.

A number of side projects are using similar approaches nowadays and some are using the same code that Callisto introduced first.

Governance: Treasury

Callisto Network governance model was never implemented. Until now we stayed with the initial “temporary” model with manually controlled Treasury account.

Well, what we proved right is that having Treasury is far better than not having Treasury. From the very beginning we were using Treasury to compensate the results of multiple on-chain accidents (for example 2miners pool split that occured right after the network launch). A lot of users got refunded and a lot of issues were easily prevented simply because we followed this practice.

The policy of financial transparency

We were documenting transaction on-chain from the very beginning.

Initially we had the old financial report in a Google spreadsheet
Later it was upgraded to GDPR-compatible version
Finally we ended up documenting transactions on-chain. Every transaction from Treasury address has hex-encoded data that represents the description of the transaction.

In my opinion the practice of financial transparency is incredibly important for an open project such as Callisto Network.

Incubator of Ideas

Earlier we had EthereumCommonwealth/Proposals system in place. The original idea was to give community the opportunity to propose ideas and get funding for the implementation.

The idea evolved into “We fund you” program. For comparison EOS Network Foundation runs a similar program as well. This practice becomes trending in crypto industry as it attracts new users and helps to sustain the ecosystem growth.

This is a successful aspect of the project and this practice must continue.

The recent success of NFTs

NFTs were trending in crypto during the past year and we have a number of NFT projects on CLO chain already. We are using the CallistoNFT standard and I think it brings significant advantages to the ecosystem by allowing users to (1) use their NFTs to record their own data and (2) trade NFTs p2p bypassing marketplaces.

We must develop and improve the NFT ecosystem in the future as the adoption is harmed by the lack of explorers, NFT-supporting wallets and a lot of peripheral services.

Projects that joined Callisto ecosystem

Artefin, Czech-based art gallery
TheRepublic, content infrastructure for virtual worlds
VIP Warz, NFT game developed by a community member
PowerCar, NFT game developed by a community member
CHOAM security token
Chatity NFT

Crosschain Bridge

Crosschain bridge is an another successful aspect of the project. Interblockchain communications are the future of the industry so we are making a step in the right direction at least.

However the bridges are not autonomous and semi-centralized. It would be better to improve the implementation.

Introduce an abstracted bridge system which would allow for the implementation of a non-EVM bridges
Improve decentralization
Improve automatization of the bridges
Research the possibility of bridge monetization and possibly provide Bridge-as-a-Service features to multiple side projects

Consensus mechanism upgrade

Recently, we have been looking into ways to improve our POW consensus. This is still in “research” stage. Read more here.

Here you can find a currently investigated paper.

We want to improve the TPS metric as well as strengthen our position as an ASIC resistant project. We are investigating the following possible upgrades to achieve this:

POW-POS hybrid consensus implementation
Consensus layer masternodes implementation
POW upgrade

Consensus mechanism upgrade researched by Dr.ZS at Callisto Enterprise

Here you can find the POW upgrade vision description.

The new conception introduces three types of blocks:

Voting blocks
Proposing blocks
Transaction blocks

Transaction blocks actually hold transactions just like normal blocks on Callisto chain currently. Proposer blocks should contain references to transaction blocks. Voter blocks contain the information needed to organize proposer blocks in the chain.

The increase in throughput can be achieved by packing transaction blocks into consensus-related blocks and separating the process of recording transactions to the network from the process of block validation.

Expanding the engagement

At the moment we have well-built community within Callisto Network project. Some follow us since the very beginning of the project when it was first announced within ETC comunity. However we offer a lot of services that benefit smart-contract developers and their communities. The developers community within Callisto is relatively small.

Our further goal is to improve our exposure within multiple smart-contract development communities and among DAPP developers.

Exchange listings

For long time Callisto have been mainly traded at Bitfinex exchange. One of our main goals is to increase the number of exchanges where CLO and it’s tokens are traded.