Renaming Hyperchains

Community
#1

As you know, Hiro has been working on a high-throughput, low-latency scaling solution for Stacks called hyperchains. Today we have a community update: we need to rename hyperchains. The trademark for “Hyperchains’’ is already registered, and in order to avoid any potential issues, we want to make this change as swiftly as possible.

At Hiro, we strongly recommend pivoting the name “hyperchains” back to “subnets” for a handful of reasons. Read them in full on the Hiro blog.

We’re not finalizing this pivot yet. We want to give the Stacks community ample time to weigh in on the new (or old) name for hyperchains. If you have questions or comments, tune in to the Hyperchains AMA on August 11th at 3pm EST on Twitter (you can set a reminder for the AMA here) or chime in on the forum thread below.

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#2

Fully support the shift back to subnets, makes sense on every level! Appreciate the Hiro team being so proactive about making sure we land on a quality, useable name :pray:

2 Likes
#3

I think its a great and necessary move. :+1:

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#4

SGTM, cheers.

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#5

Going back to subnets is fine.

#6

@cuevasm @joebender t occurred to me that “Subnets” by itself is descriptive of what it is but is boring and does not depict what it does and why people should care or even get excited about it. And… intrigue ppl and devs to investigate it. I think it might be marketed better by calling it something that speaks to it’s primary benefit of SPEED. Also, to differentiate it from Avalanche subnets.
So off the top of my head some examples…

  • Subnet Express
  • Stacks Subnet Express (SSE)

or find some other word for “express” that connotes speed.

Also, we should be forward thinking that different subnets will probably be created for solving different use-cases. For example data storage. So say SSS (Stacks Storage Subnet), etc.

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#7

btw the “Express” idea came from the PC SSD “stick” hardware name PCIe (PCI Express). :wink:

#8

I tend to agree with you, but I am also not in charge of the name. I would assume different Subnets that have different tradeoffs and are run by different providers would have their own more specific names. cc @elena_hiro

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#9

Thanks for the feedback. There’s a lot of potential for exciting names especially as you mentioned for use-case or application specific subnets.

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#10

I tend to disagree here - in networking the idea of what subnets are is well understood. the more i understand about the ideas behind “hyperchains”, the more it makes sense to simply call them “subnets”.

Yes, the goals of this are slightly more nuanced than the TCP networking side of things - the overall structure makes perfect sense to me.

each subnet is a “section” of it’s parent, and they all eventually roll back up into the root subnet.
a good writeup of the concept is here: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/network-layer/what-is-a-subnet/

I would argue that keeping the name simple and memorable (i.e. subnets) makes great sense here.

However…i’m also familiar with TCP subnetting as a concept already, and I’ll admit it might be slightly more challenging for less technical people to grasp.

Official naming, i’m in support of the simply named subnets.
I’m not a fan of adding more acronyms if it can be avoided, but stacks subnets/sse does have a certain appeal - but it also has the effect of requiring someone coming into Stacks to first learn all of these new acronyms.

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#11

Agreed. It’s well understood “in networking”. Which is the point I’m trying to make here.
It’s not a good term (by itself) for marketing to the less technical people who are the majority of crypto users and investors. But to be clear, I’m not suggesting “subnets” be remove or replaced. I’m just saying maybe it can be tweaked/augmented.