From a technical perspective, Nervos is a layered network.
Graphic from the first version of the Nervos whitepaper.
The layer 1 is a permission-less public blockchain called Nervos Common Knowledge Base, with a fully programmable virtual machine, secured by miners (PoW) and run by a community around the world. The layer 2 can be blockchains, payment channels, plasma, state channels, or centralized services.
Mainnet Lina was launched on Nov 16, 2019 and its native token is CKB (CKByte)
The minimalism philosophy in designing the system, and all the people contributing to it makes Nervos different.
In terms of its tech stack, Nervos makes extremely efficient use of a blockchain, moving the majority of user interactions to upper layers that the Layer 1 Common Knowledge Base blockchain secures.
In order to reach internet scale, Nervos does not significantly increase the on-chain computation speed or the amount of data that can be stored on the Layer 1 blockchain, what it does is to push all transactions to upper layers and let Layer 1 to focus on being a trust anchor and settlement layer.
This design ensures any user can verify all of the blockchain's data and that the network will always be supported by a wide network of nodes, run by users without dedicated hardware or cloud instances.
Breaking the Throughput Limit of Nakamoto Consensus
Crypto-economics Design for a Preservation Focused Layer 1 Blockchain
The Proof-of-Work Function of Nervos CKB
Check the Nervos Positioning Paper: [EN](https://github.com/nervosnetwork/rfcs/blob/master/rfcs/0001-positioning/0001-positioning.md](https://github.com/nervosnetwork/rfcs/blob/master/rfcs/0001-positioning/0001-positioning.md)) CN and [Nervos Improvement Proposals](https://nervosckb.notion.site/Nervos-Improvement-Proposals-f2f3b1da4b9a40d7b4c7995e6bdddc8d) for more details about the design of system.