By Michael Kong, edited by Michael Chen

Updating the community about our new paper

Hey Fantomians, today we have the honor of sharing a new research paper which introduces our proof of stake model which is suitable for a DAG-based trustless system. With the introduction of our Fantom Improvement Proposals earlier in the year (FIP#1 and FIP#2) we’ve been getting a lot of questions about the details of our staking model, and the thought that has gone into its design. Today marks the day that we can finally answer those questions, without further ado we present: ‘StakeDag: Stake-based Consensus For Scalable Trustless Systems’.

Read our new research paper on Cornell’s arXiv right now.

About the paper

Trustless systems, such as those blockchain empowered, provide trust in the system regardless of the trust of its participants, who may be honest or malicious. Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols and DAG-based approaches have emerged as a better alternative than the proof of work (PoW) for consensus.

This paper introduces a new model, so-called \emph{\stakedag}, which aims for PoS consensus in a DAG-based trustless system. We address a general model of trustless system in which participants are distinguished by their stake or trust: users and validators. Users are normal participants with a no assumed trust and validators are high profile participants with an established trust. We then propose a new family of stake-based consensus protocols S, operating on the DAG as in the Lachesis protocol~\cite{lachesis01}.

Specifically, we propose a stake-based protocol Sϕ that leverages participants’ stake as validating weights to achieve more secure distributed systems with practical Byzantine fault tolerance (pBFT) in a leaderless asynchronous Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). We then present a general model of staking for asynchronous DAG-based distributed systems.

Contributors

Alex Kampa. CEO Sikoba Research: http://research.sikoba.com

George Samman. Sammantics: http://sammantics.com/

Michael Kong. CIO Fantom Foundation: https://fantom.foundation/

Andre Cronje. Technical Advisor Fantom Foundation: https://fantom.foundation/

Quan Nguyen. Core Developer Fantom Foundation: https://fantom.foundation/