Overview
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The Verifiable Settlement Layer (VSL) does one and only one thing: verifiable settlement.
VSL is the Pi Squared's signature infrastructure-level decentralized network that offers scalable, affordable, and customizable verifiability to all Web3 protocols, applications, and users. It encodes payments, transactions, computations, assets, and data as VSL claims—the fundamental building blocks of anything verifiable or provable across platforms, ecosystems, and blockchains.
These VSL claims can be verified via all possible means: digital signatures, re-execution, remote attestations, formal proofs, as well as cryptographic and zero-knowledge proofs. Applications and users—not the VSL—decide what claims they need and what proofs they accept.
VSL just does one thing that we call verifiable settlement: accepting claims, verifying them against their proofs, and settling them for good, with fast, cheap, public, and permissionless access.
VSL is the missing infrastructure in the current Web3 ecosystem. That missing infrastructure is verifiability, only with which assets and data can be securely moved around and across platforms. At Pi Squared, we offer that missing infrastructure via the VSL network.
Web3 is suffering from fragmentation, where blockchains and platforms come with their own consensus protocols and programming paradigms, which leads to slow, cumbersome, complex, and expensive cross-chain user experience.
This issue of fragmentation makes "1 + 1" less than 2. User base is split; user experience is fragmented; liquidity is locked; resources are wasted; incentives are misaligned; and technology innovations are stagnant.
VSL addresses the issue of fragmentation by offering an open layer for verifiable settlement and making "1 + 1" greater than 2. All Web3 participants and parties can submit to the VSL all of their key data and computation as claims, which, after being verified, are settled on the VSL network for good.
We aim at making it super easy to integrate your blockchains, applications, services, or protocols to the VSL, so you can get immediate benefits such as fast payments and verifiable cross-chain data and information. This is especially true if your product already has a clear set of API endpoints that determine how users and/or other systems should interact with it.
As a general principle, the first step to integrate with the VSL is to identify claims and choose the corresponding proof methods for the claims. A claim should carry a piece of information that is self-contained and can be interpreted independently, which is usually a computation task's result or a service's output. A proof is additional witness or evidence that is needed to verify the claim.
VSL allows any types of claims as long as they are independent and self-contained, and accepts all types of proofs as long as the verification process is deterministic.
Different proof types come with different trust assumptions and security guarantees. Users and applications are free to decide if they want to accept or reject certain proof types. VSL doesn't judge; it just verifies, and settles.
In the VSL, there are two participants communicating between each other: a client who has a claim and a (tentative) proof, and a verifier who knows how to verify the claim against the proof.
Below shows a typical and simple workflow that involves only one client and one verifier:
The client initiates the workflow by submitting a claim together with a tentative proof to the VSL, usually with a promised verification fee, resulting in a verification request being settled on the VSL.
The verifier who monitors or listens to the VSL observes the verification request and verifies it.
The verifier submits a signed message to the VSL, indicating the successful verification of the verification request, resulting in the original claim being settled on the VSL.
The verification fee will be paid entirely to the verifier who successfully fulfills the verification request. VSL takes no cent from it.
For a higher security level, the client can indicate a quorum size. This means that the claim can only be settled if it is verified by a number of verifiers that form a quorum of the indicated size. In this case, the verification fee will be distributed among all the verifiers in the quorum. In all cases, VSL takes no cent from the verification fee.
The only fee charged by the VSL is the settlement fee, one per settlement. Both the client and the verifier need to pay this fee as they settle verification requests and verified claims on the VSL. We aim at making the settlement fee extremely low. While a precise number is being decided, we are looking at a price below $0.01 per settlement.
All settled claims can be accessible from any platform or blockchain. Upon a query on whether a given claim has been settled, VSL returns an answer together with a VSL membership proof that is a lightweight certificate that is verifiable by the on-chain VSL smart contracts. There need to be one and only one VSL smart contract per blockchain.
Try out our VSL-Powered Example Demos.
