The Essentia labs have been buzzing with energy as the international community prepares for the mainnet launch. From what started as a vision to unite decentralized technologies through interoperability and accessibility, the Web 3.0 is now officially knocking on the door of global adoption — as the Essentia Web/Desktop is released and being updated.
The Essentia chain has taken into consideration the multitude of relevant factors when creating and implementing the blockchain network. The team constantly strives to be at the forefront of emerging technologies and has examined the various possibilities to ensure maximum scalability and interoperability for consumers, organizations and developers alike.
As we have seen, the implementation of certain consensus methods has considerably affected the transaction per second (TPS) rate depending on many sharding and voting mechanism related variables, the size of the block, etc. These differences reflect the huge disparity existing within the market between certain blockchain projects.
Through a simplification of the process, PoS has significantly improved TPS, however, the trade-off has notably resulted in diminished transaction security. Essentia therefor plans to implement a Hybrid Consensus, supplemented by an enhanced voting mechanism in PoS, PoW, and Shards. With “database in memory” architecture for PoS consensus, Essentia will be able to significantly increase TPS frequency.
With a Hybrid consensus, Essentia aims to achieve a level of stability and security on a scale that has yet to be matched. For example, the risk of large pool mining (51% attack with too much influence on the network) is reduced to zero by the PBFT (Practical Byzantine fault tolerance) mechanism as the block is checked twice and signed by a randomly selected PoS voters.
The Hybrid consensus
Further preventing bad behaviour, the chance of conspiracy between PoW and PoS miners is completely removed as voters are selected only after the block is created. Even if PoS were to attempt to conspire to affect the network, the crypto-stable generator randomly chooses the PoS voter which inevitably voids any efforts in doing so. The possibility of receiving multiple tickets belonging to a single group are so minute that they are not worth considering — even if this was to happen, each transaction is verified at least twice with separate voters.
The implementation of PoS consensus in a Hybrid scheme is critical for effective security and scalability. Within the Essentia consensus, TPS increases corresponding with network scalability using shard.
How the chain of blocks are formed
The Shard
The block in a shard is created by the first supernode chosen and signed by its private key. The block is then transmitted to a randomly selected group of more than 3 Masternodes. The Masternode-receiver then checks the signature, executes and validates the block with all of the transactions and Dapps within. When the shard block is confirmed, the Masternode-receiver signs it and sends its signature along with a hash to the other Masternodes in the public network. Once the shard collects at least two-thirds of the Masternode signatures, the block is approved and signed.
Block of the main block
The Block of the main network is initiated by a Masternode after the shard is confirmed. The initiating procedure of the main network block is similar to the shard block, except this time at least two-thirds are involved in the process.
Chain algorithm
Step 1: A new block containing a header includes the hash of the previous block is accepted by the network. If there are no tickets in the network, the block is rejected.
Step 2: A Masternode checks the new block, which includes a valid list of recently published transactions starting from the root of the Hash-tree. The Masternode votes for the block and sends a signed control block.
Step 3: Any new blocks have a consensus among at least three masternodes. The number of masternodes can vary depending on the entropy of the chain. For any given number of masternodes, there are three requirements:
● A block has passed validation when the majority of masternodes voted for it. This block is considered as valid and referred to the new shard. “Positive” masternodes, receive a reward, while absentees and “negatives” do not receive compensation.
● The block is rejected if the majority of masternodes voted “negative”. The “negative” masternodes receive a reward, but the absentees and “positive” do receive nothing.
● expired and expended tickets cannot vote.
Step 4. The SHA3–256 hash of the previous block in the header of the block of the new header of the supernode block, which is also hashed is included.
In order for the masternode to participate, in the voting masternode must transfer X amount of cryptocurrencies to the voting cards. The masternode votes only for the initial block in the mainnet rest of voters selected by the masternode from the full list of active nodes.
The voting algorithm for the PoS block
- The Masternode initiates a network transaction. This transaction transfers the assets from its purse to the newly created address.
- This transaction is included in the next chain block and is confirmed by the supernode. The transaction address is not readable after that.
- Based on the Supernode block, a 16-bit ticket is created.
- A Masternode is selected and then sends its PoS-block to the network of blocking and either confirms or rejects the last supernode block. There are two possible scenarios:
- Voting to confirm or deny a newly created supernode occurs when masternode creates its PoS-block. A transaction with quotes in this block provides a reward (the current interest rate). The output address containing the cryptocurrency used to send the transaction, and the reward, is unlocked and can now be used.
- The voting block Masternode cannot be created if the input does not receive the Supernode block. In this case, the ticket is marked as “invalid”, no reward is given, the funds on the initial output address are unblocked and, thus, can be spent.
You should pay attention to the masternode election. To prevent attacks on the voting mechanism it is first of all necessary to avoid predictability by determining the next selection based on the previous values. Therefor Essentia uses a crypto-stable pseudo-random number generator to eliminate this risk.
Reward Mechanism
The division of rewards are as follows:
- To compensate for the costs of mining PoW miners receive 25%.
- PoS-miners receive 75%
Premine is 8% (40382608.64 coins) of the total supply of 504782608 coins. The reward for the block begins with 0.2286650214 coins for MasterNode and 0.4939164462 coins for SuperNode.
We’ll be releasing more information as the time goes (as we’ve previously done with our Sneak Peak article). A non-technical blockchain overview is on its way!
For now, the detailed technical overview of the future Essentia blockchain is already available in the Docs menu on our official website.
If you have any questions please feel free to reach us out via social media channels.
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