Overview of TomoChain

The blockchain industry and the infrastructure of the Internet of Value are being built rapidly around the globe, and to many the atmosphere is eerily similar to the building of the Internet in the late ’90s, with pioneers and dreamers coming together to build a new future. The objective of TomoChain is to become a leading part of this phenomenon through seamlessly merging an ecosystem of applications with cryptographic tokens used by millions of mainstream users with a unique blockchain infrastructure architecture, allowing for fast, frictionless payment and a secure, decentralised, and trusted store of value.

TomoChain aims to be a public EVM-compatible blockchain with the following advantages: low transaction fee, fast confirmation time, double validation and randomization for security guarantees. TomoChain envisions an ecosystem of different DApps running on the TomoChain blockchain infrastructure.

In particular, we propose a solution for solving the transaction processing performance bottleneck in Ethereum which hinders its adoption into industries, especially finance. More specifically, we are constructing an efficient and secured consensus protocol, which tackles the following main bottlenecks of classic blockchains:

Efficiency: The small throughput of Bitcoin and Ethereum severely hinders a widespread adoption of such crypto- currencies.

Confirmation times: Bitcoin takes on average 1 hour to confirm a transaction because the confirmation of a Bitcoin block requires 5 subsequent blocks created following it. While Ethereum uses a smaller block-time, the average confirmation time still remains relatively high, around 13 minutes. These long confirmation times hinder many important applications (especially smart contract applications).

Fork Generation: The problem of fork chain consumes computational energy, time, and creates potential vulnerabilities for different types of attacks.

In the newly published technical paper, TomoChain proposes the Proof-of-Stake Voting (PoSV) consensus, which is a PoS-based blockchain protocol with a fair voting mechanism, rigorous security guarantees, and uniform probability eventually. The consensus has the following key novelties:

Double Validation to strengthen security and reduce fork

Randomization to guarantee the fair and prevent handshaking attack

Fast confirmation time and efficient checkpoints for finality or rebase

TomoChain Team is currently implementing these mechanisms based on the Ethereum source code.

Overview of EOS.IO

The EOS.IO blockchain architecture is designed to enable vertical and horizontal scaling of decentralised applications. This is achieved by creating an operating system-like construct upon which applications can be built. EOS.IO offers a blockchain architecture that may ultimately scale to millions of transactions per second, eliminate user fees, and allow for quick and easy deployment and maintenance of decentralised applications, in the context of a governed blockchain. EOS.IO, led by Daniel Larimer, relies on the Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus protocol, which stems from the Bitshares DPoS. Its performance promises to scale to millions of transactions per second with a great ecosystem of DApps running on it.

Overview of Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG)

Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget is an overlay atop a proposal mechanism, which proposes blocks. Casper FFG roadmap is organised into multiple steps to overcome the bottlenecks of the current PoW-based Ethereum. Specifically, One of Casper’s development phases aims to be a hybrid PoS/PoW solution before transitioning Ethereum into a wholly PoS-based system. A key component of Casper FFG is checkpoint blocks to provide explicit finality. These checkpoint blocks are responsible for finalising the blocks, essentially selecting a unique chain which represents the canonical transactions of the ledger. Casper provides safety, but liveness depends on the chosen proposal mechanism. That is, if attackers wholly control the proposal mechanism, Casper protects against finalizing two conflicting checkpoints, but the attackers could prevent Casper from finalizing any future checkpoints.

Overview of Cardano

Cardano is the first full open-source decentralized public blockchain and cryptocurrency project based on peer-reviewed academic work implemented in Haskel. It is developed by IOHK engineering body in conjunction with multiple universities. Cardano uses the a secure Proof of Stake consensus, namely, Ouroboros. The latter is backed by strong researches and sound mathematical formalisations and proofs that provide more confidence about security and scalability. Cardano promises to allow for developers to build decentralised applications and contracts and run them in a low-cost, secure, private, scalable and legal environment. On one hand, Cardano Ouroboros is geared towards user privacy. On the other hand, it also takes into consideration the needs of regulators in order to easily upgrade the system. In doing so, Cardano claims being the first protocol to balance these requirements in a nuanced and effective way, pioneering a new approach for cryptocurrencies.

Overview of Tendermint

The Tendermint blockchain infrastructure is designed to be easy-to-use, simple-to-understand, highly performant, and useful for a wide variety of distributed applications. Tendermint aims for secure and consistent replication of an application on many machines. Security means that Tendermint works even if up to 1/3 of machines fail in arbitrary ways. Consistency means that every non-faulty machine sees the same transaction log and computes the same state. These two properties play a critical role in the fault tolerance of a broad range of applications, from currencies, to elections, to infrastructure orchestration, and beyond.

Tendermint consists of a consensus engine, called Tendermint Core and a generic application interface. Tendermint Core relies of the PoS and Byzatine Fault Tolerance (BFT) to ensure that every machine stores the same transactions in the same order. On the other hand, the application interface enables the transactions to be processed in any programming language. Therefore, developers can use Tendermint for BFT state machine replication of applications written in whatever programming language and development environment is right for them.