Ethereum Researcher Vlad Zamfir joins RChain Co-op Board of Directors

Ethereum researcher Vlad Zamfir has joined the RChain cooperative’s board of directors. Vlad, who is popularly known for his work on Ethereum’s Proof-of Stake (POS) consensus mechanism Casper, posted on his Twitter feed that he is excited to help the RChain ecosystem with blockchain governance.

Until recently, most blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have been using a proof-of-work (POW) consensus protocol. Proof of work has a couple of major problems. It is highly energy intensive and it is estimated that mining activities associated with proof of work use more electricity than the whole of Iceland. Also, increasing mining difficulty as in Bitcoin’s POW consensus mechanism makes mining more expensive, raising the barrier of entry for miners, which increases the risk of centralization. In an effort to mitigate these problems, Ethereum’s developers and researchers came up with Casper. Casper; the friendly ghost, named after the 1995 American movie, is a security-deposit based economic consensus protocol. This means that nodes have to be bonded validators (place a security deposit) in order to be able to forge blocks. The protocol’s control of the security deposits is one way the incentives of validators are affected by Casper. Casper uses a mechanism known as ‘slasher’ to disincentivize bad actors and solve the ‘nothing at stake’ problem. It does this by making bad actors lose their stake/bonded security deposit and prevents them from participating in the consensus process when they try to act in a malicious manner although there are concerns about penalizing innocent nodes. Vlad has been researching Casper since 2015 along with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, Greg Meredith of RChain, and several other developers and mathematicians.

RChain is a parallelized blockchain with governance built into it. Governance has been a problem for blockchains without an inherent governance mechanism as has been the case with Bitcoin and its block size debate which lingered for more than two years and does not seem to be solved. Blockchains with an inherent governance mechanism aim to be faster in pushing upgrades to the network, charting a clear direction and roadmap with likely fewer hardforks, especially contentious ones. Upgrades can voted upon easily by bonded validators or by some other means depending on the type of governance system implemented. This helps blockchains to be able to adapt and adopt features quickly and helps the network grow organically.

The RChain open cooperative governs development of the open-source RChain platform. Proposals are made along with a budget (if any) by active members of the co-op, and then voted upon by members. Being a member gives you opportunities to propose projects, budgets, help decide on governance related issues. Each active member of the cooperative accounts for one vote, and helps to determine very important matters, like the election of new Board of Directors and Officers. Also, every active member gets a share of the “net distribute-able surplus” generated by the cooperative in ratio to purchases made during a particular period. The co-op is still in its formative stages but it is already being developed and used by the community for budget proposals and staging of projects.

Vlad joins Kenny Rowe, co-founder of MakerDAO, and five other board directors. Both Vlad and Kenny are passionate about governance and consensus in distributed systems with Vlad working on Casper since 2015 and Kenny working on MakerDAO which has its own governing mechanism.