ThunderCore’s Fast-Path PoS Scheme – ThunderCore –

ThunderCore’s Fast-Path PoS Scheme – ThunderCore –

Part 1 Committee Structure

This is the first of a series of publications that explains ThunderCore’s Proof-of-Stake and incentive structure.

Background

ThunderCore adopts a novel, best-of-both-worlds consensus protocol [1,2,3] that simultaneously achieves high performance and decentralization. The consensus protocol combines a voting-based fast path where consensus nodes are elected partly using Proof-of-Stake (PoS), and a slow chain that can be significantly more decentralized than the fast-path.

Almost all the time, consensus is achieved on the fast path offering a high TPS; and the slow chain is only used infrequently for auditing, censorship resilience, and recovery from extraordinary circumstances. In our first main-net release, we rely on Ethereum as the slow chain. In the next major release, our fast-path will upgrade to the new Pala protocol [4] that enables seamless accelerator-switch on the fast-path with no delay.

Committee Structure

In the first year immediately after launch, a total of 32 committee seats will be provided on the fast path. We are committed to increasing the number of seats in the foreseeable future to increase the degree of decentralization on the fast path.

We would like to achieve a committee structure and incentive scheme that accomplishes the following goals:

• encourage broad participation and ensure a degree of decentralization on the fast path itself;
• ensure that a sufficient amount of stake participates in the fast-path consensus, thus achieving economic robustness;
• offer incentives mechanisms, not only to encourage participation, but also to encourage honest participation and high-performance participation (e.g., that elected committee members are committed to invest sufficiently in hardware provisioning)

We are committed to providing the following fast-path committee structure

25% Reserved Seats

The reserved seats will be elected through an open call-for-participation (to be released soon). We would like to encourage universities and non-profit organizations to participate. Each reserved seat will be leased to a participant on a yearly basis; and a renewal application will be provided to continue the lease after a year.

When necessary and appropriate, ThunderCore can loan stake for strategic partners to participate.

We plan to announce the first open call for participation by May 31, 2019. The first batch of partners will be announced by August 31, 2019.

25% Staking Pools

To allow small stake-holders to participate in fast-path consensus, ThunderCore will encourage and support strategic partners to provide staking-pool services. 25% of the seats are reserved to staking pools.

ThunderCore will release our own implementation of staking pool service by May 15, 2019. The remaining seats will be selected through an open call-for-proposal. We will evaluate the proposals based on criteria such as technical strength and team qualifications. The first call-for-proposal will be announced by May 31, 2019, and the first batch of selections will be made by August 31, 2019. Whenever necessary and appropriate, ThunderCore can loan stake to strategic partners to provide staking services.

50% Open Bidding

These open seats will be selected through periodic, open bidding on a daily to weekly basis. Such periodic committee re-election and bidding process is an inherent part of our open-source blockchain implementation. Interested participants can, at any time, put down stake on the blockchain to enter the bidding. Our committee selection algorithm will automatically select the next committee based on criteria such as 1) the amount of stake available; and 2) past records of performance. We plan to make open seats available to everyone by Q3, 2020.

We will soon release Part 2 of the blog series that explains in more detail our open, stake-based committee election scheme.

Incentives

To encourage high-performance and honest participation, committee members can earn “interest” from transaction fees and “block rewards”.

ThunderCore has devised a unique business strategy towards acquiring users and we strongly believe that we can fundamentally solve the lack-of-daily-active-user pain-point for blockchains in the next couple of years. Therefore, in the medium term, we anticipate that the transaction fees will provide sufficient incentives ensuring that an ample amount of stake participates in the fast-path consensus.

In the first three years after main-net launch when we are still in the process of rolling out our user acquisition strategy, we are committed to providing additional incentives, in the form of block rewards, to each seat holder. The block rewards will supplement the transaction fees, such that the total return on investment is the equivalent of 30% annual rate applied to up to X = 100,000,000 Thunder Tokens (TTs) of stake. If Y > X amount of is put down, the additional Y-X amount will earn only transaction fees. We have committed to an appropriate incentive allocation in our genesis block to make this possible.

References

[1] Rafael Pass and Elaine Shi. Thunderella: Blockchains with Optimistic Instant Confirmation. In Eurocrypt, 2018

[2] Rafael Pass and Elaine Shi. The Thunder Protocol. https://docs.thundercore.com/thunder-whitepaper.pdf

[3] Rafael Pass and Elaine Shi. ThunderCore (Lite-paper). https://docs.thundercore.com/thunder-litepaper.pdf

[4] T-H. Hubert Chan and Rafael Pass and Elaine Shi. Pala: A Simple Partially Synchronous Blockchain. https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/981.pdf

Published at Wed, 08 May 2019 14:42:37 +0000