Archethic recently conducted a token burn which destroyed 90% of its tokens in an unprecedented move. The innovative platform enables streamlined biometric Decentralized ID (DID) smart contracts authenticated by fingerprint recognition, amongst other outstanding capabilities such as functioning without error even when up to 90% of its network is compromised by malicious actors. We take a look at the inner workings of the protocol.
Q: How does Archethic’s consensus protocol ensure scalability?
Akshay, Chief Product Officer: Archethic Blockchain has developed its own consensus protocol from scratch called ARCH Consensus.
ARCH makes it possible to obtain universal consensus from a small part of nodes. This is proven using hypergeometric distribution laws (Heuristics) which makes it possible to obtain with certainty the same answer by querying 200 randomly selected (Rotating) nodes as would be by querying 100,000. In other words, out of the 200 nodes randomly selected (for consensus) there will be at least 1 good node even when 90% of nodes are malicious. This distribution makes it highly scalable plus being coupled with Atomic Commitment results in extremely high fraud tolerance. (below is the hypergeometric distribution equation)
To further explain in detail, ARCH stands for Atomic Rotating Commitment Heuristic.
– Atomic Commitment is the form of “absolute” consensus that implies 100% concordant responses for the acceptance or refusal of the transaction validation.
– Heuristics is the set of algorithms, softwares and parameters that manage the entire network, allowing the network to elect in a decentralized and coordinated way the nodes in charge of validating and storing transaction chains.
– Rotating the network being fully distributed (no central or privileged role), the nodes elected for each operation are constantly changing so that no node can predict which nodes will be elected until the transaction arrives.
Q: How does Archethic handle network traffic more seamlessly?
Samuel, Chief Software Architect: The high scalability and throughput of the network is due to:
- Transactions Chains: Archethic Blockchain is unique because it’s a transaction chain with one transaction in one block. A block is constituted by only one transaction and every entity on the blockchain has its chain. It’s not a global chain of every transaction & action on the network, but rather a general blockchain that hierarchies & controls an enormous amount of chains since every user and every smart contract will have its own chain. Here, since all the chains are independent but connected between themselves, it enables transactions and approvals to go a lot faster. The transaction of a user will not interfere with other users’ transactions, even though the blockchain will check the consistency of the integrality of the network to stop someone from taking advantage of the system.
- Hypergeometric Distribution: Hypergeometric distribution ensures that the network is secure even if 90% nodes are malicious, unlike other blockchains which would be prone to 51% attacks. Randomness in choosing the validating node is the key to how secure it is.These two aspects ensure that the network handles traffic seamlessly.
Q: Seeing as Archethic’s network security layer relies on having a large number of nodes running simultaneously in order to assure the highest level of protection, what incentives does Archethic offer to people to maintain nodes on the Archethic network?
Akshay, Chief Product Officer:
Archethic blockchain has a dedicated wallet to ensure that the incentives are paid through the Dynamic Miner Rewards Pool: The purpose of this wallet is to achieve the goal of self-sustenance. The miner incentives must reflect the cost of running the node, hence this value must be indexed to fiat currency. This would be a fixed value incentive which would more than compensate the cost of running the node.
The economics of reaching the goal of self-sustenance will require the miners to be compensated for running the node even when the transaction fees cannot cover those costs. This pool would be used to ensure the incentives payment to each miner. This is the period of inflation when the tokens from this pool get added to the circulating supply due to miner remuneration.
Then comes the phase of equilibrium when the transaction fees will cover the payment of incentives. During this phase none of the tokens from this pool will get released to the circulating supply.
Finally, we will reach the phase of deflation. This is the phase when the transaction fees are more than the incentives required to remunerate all the miners. During this phase we will burn the excess transaction fee and hence lead to deflation. Deflation will lead to an increase of the token value based on the equation of exchange. This is a virtuous cycle which will reduce the transaction fee and miner incentives in terms of tokens since the token value increases.
Thus, this pool will have the ability to dynamically sustain the miner node economics during the phases of inflation, equilibrium, and deflation.
Q: Seeing as how Archethic is being billed as an eco-friendly blockchain, are you working toward any other goals to further reduce Archethic’s carbon footprint?
Samuel, Chief Software Architect:
Archethic is the most eco friendly blockchain. Yes, the ARCH consensus’s PoW is redesigned in such a way that the energy consumed is 3.6 billion times less than the bitcoin network.
Daily Consumption of a Archethic node working at 100%: 15Wh (e.g. Intel NUC i3)
- Ten nodes are needed for 10 seconds to validate and replicate a transaction (however, the current figures for validation of a transaction are less than 1 second for a single node and around 100 ms for the replication).
- The number of transactions on the Bitcoin network is 93 million transactions per year with an energy consumption of around 38.7 TWh/year.
- The number of transactions validated by 10 nodes per year in Archethic network is 365.4 × 24 × 60 × 6 = 3,157,046 transactions (becoz 10 nodes are dedicated for 10 sec to validate a transaction)
- The number of nodes required to handle the current yearly Bitcoin transactions is 93,000,000 ÷ 3,157,046 = 29.45 sets of 10 nodes = 29.45 × 10 = 295 nodes
Only 295 nodes are required by the Archethic network to cover the current performance of the Bitcoin network. Thus we can safely say that Archethic Blockchain consumes very less energy as compared to other key players in this space. As a Public Blockchain, we wish to not only reduce the carbon footprint but also make adoption of the technology easy and sustainable in the longer run.
Q: Can you explain how Archethic handles sharding in simple terms?
Samuel, Chief Software Architect:
The sharding technology allows for an unlimited and sustainable scalability of blockchains. 3 different aspects under this –
Transaction Sharding through Transaction Chain
Computational Sharding through Hypergeometric Distribution
Storage sharding through Heuristics Storage leading to Polymorphic Replication
To add further, we have introduced Self Healing Mechanism, due to the unpredictability of the P2P network, to ensure the consistent performance of a shard.
The transaction/computation/storage is divided into tiny parts and each part has its own shard and no two transactions/computation/storage(data) have the same shard.
In other words, instead of assigning the data to a particular shard, assign a shard to particular data so that no two data have the same shard.
Ensure geographical distribution of the shard so that local disruptions can be overcome.
Distribute the sharding information itself onto another sharded decentralized chain.
To get an indepth understanding, please refer to our Yellow Paper.
Q: Can you explain Archethic’s consensus protocol in simple terms?
Akshay, Chief Product Officer:
ARCH makes it possible to obtain universal consensus from a small part of nodes. This is proven using hypergeometric distribution laws (Heuristics) which makes it possible to obtain with certainty the same answer by querying 200 randomly selected (rotating) nodes as would be by querying 100,000. In other words, out of the 200 nodes randomly selected (for consensus) there will be at least 1 good node even when 90% of nodes are malicious. This distribution makes it highly scalable plus being coupled with atomic commitment results in extremely high fraud tolerance. (below is the hypergeometric distribution equation)
In layman’s terms: Consider a village of 100,000 people where every person in the village keeps the entire payments records of all the people in the village. Alice and Bob are citizens of the village.
Traditional Consensus: When Alice sends Bob 10 units (of some currency) you normally expect all the 100,000 people to approve this transaction, this takes a lot of time and the village will not be able to process a lot of these transactions.
For example: In ARCH Consensus, when Alice sends Bob 10 units (of some currency), the transaction is validated by randomly selecting 200 people out of 100,000 people, where all the 200 selected will have the same answer. This takes very less time to validate and the village is able to process any number of transactions.
Traditional Consensus (100000 approvals) == ARCH Consensus (200 approvals)
Q: Any interesting news you’d like to share with us on Archethic?
Akshay, Chief Product Officer:
We have a lot of interesting news for our community. Some of the top ones being –
Archethic is one of the few listed public blockchains to burn 90% of its tokens.
In 2022 we aim to:
Full deployment of the Archethic network that would allow the UCO swap from ERC20, etc to mainnet UCOs along with the mobile wallet (with UCO, NFT functionality etc)
250K+ UCO holders
250+ developers
1M+ community followers
Decentralized Website application to host thousands of websites
Decentralize Email application
