By Daniel Hines, from Deku team
In July, we launched an alphanet for Deku Canonical, a sidechain for Tezos featuring a Web Assembly smart contract platform.
Today, we are pleased to announce the launch of a Deku Canonical betanet running on the Tezos Ghostnet. This network features better performance and stability, major improvements to the API and developer experience, and the debut of a new Wasmer-based virtual machine. You can see the smart contract addresses and API endpoints at https://marigold.dev/deku.
Sidechain Recap
There’s lots of hype and also lots of confusion over sidechains and Layer 2’s in general, so it’s worth reviewing what exactly a sidechain is.
A sidechain is a blockchain with a light client embedded in a host blockchain (the Layer 1). This light client forms a bridge between the two networks, allowing assets to move onto and off of the Layer 2 - in this aspect sidechains are similar to rollups.
As with rollups, sidechains are used to scale. But while rollups are bounded by the L1’s bandwidth and are primarily used to scale computational power, sidechains are more flexible, allowing us to choose virtually any point in the design space of consensus algorithms and blockchain implementations, which is very large.
In Deku’s case, we’ve focused on maximizing throughput and minimizing latency by using a modified Tendermint consensus algorithm, an un-Merkalized in-memory layout for storage, and exploiting OCaml 5’s multicore capabilities to parallelize as much hashing and cryptography as possible.
If you want to learn more about this Tezos bridge, please read our blogpost on Marigold website 
Announcing Deku-C Betanet
