Most DLT networks rely — and are valuated — on robust decentralization of their ledgers. Several computers, also called nodes, connect to the same network and share the same information about transactions that are then appended to the ledger.

However, only those in the network that are able to economically compete to participate have incentives for running a node. Thus, it’s usually miners who are rewarded for securing the network, may it be by proof-of-work or other consensus based algorithms.

These consensus algorithms generally favor network participants with a high purchasing power: either those participants who own the best hardware and can thus out-compete other network participants, or those who can purchase enough of an asset to be able to prove a significant stake, apart from miners it’s usually companies, open-source and research projects, or crypto-enthusiasts, who setup full-nodes, other users have no incentives or lack resources to do so.

The Problem: Lack of Incentives

While wealthy nodes can also get rewarded by acting as validators in the system, also known as “master-nodes”, there aren’t any incentives in place for non-wealthy DLT node operators to run a node. More importantly, the costs of running a fully synchronized node in the most popular protocols like Bitcoin and Ethereum are steadily increasing, mostly due to the increased storage space, bandwidth, and processing power that is required.

Keeping the whole ledger history of a blockchain is fundamental to ensure true decentralization and auditability. Take for example Ripple and its blockchain, which apparently misses thousands of blocks of its initial ledger history. In the future, this problem could repeat and potentially become a big issue on several other popular and growing blockchains that use prune, fast or warp synchronization modes. These modes enable users to quickly synchronize blockchain states to quickly interact with their wallet softwares, but they do not download the whole history, instead they either trim old blockchain data, synchronize only snapshots, headers or specific transactions related to the owner addresses.

The Solution: Rewarding Full Nodes

As adoption increases, DLT networks will need to have more full nodes, and with TxHash Network we are building the first decentralized node economy that tackles this issue by incentivizing and rewarding blockchain and other DLT node operators, which currently are passive entities acting merely as ledger state witnesses.

The nodes that have previously been ignored in the DLT infrastructure will be leveraged and rewarded for their contribution to the decentralized network, while the creation of new nodes will be incentivized as well, thereby contributing to further decentralization of networks.

The new node economy powered by TxHash Network is sustained by a technological bridge between DLT and web 2.0 services, facilitating the tracking of public ledger events using current web technologies.

TxHash Network uses the core of our SaaS tracking system to monitor transactions as they are added to any distributed ledger and performs an action once certain conditions have been triggered. For example, once a payment is received on a specific address, or an instruction is executed in a smart contract, a prespecified service is notified — this could be an email that is sent, or an API webhook that is triggered. Existing nodes will be able to simply install the TxHash Network plugin, and then enable the JSON RPC API feature (eg. geth, parity, bitcoind, litecoind, etc.). Our plugin runs a platform-agnostic core service of our SaaS, and after we open-source it, it will be hosted by full nodes of the network, which will reward them for maintaining it.

The TxHash Network Plugin uses the core of our SaaS platform and will install seamlessly to current full nodes to provide relevant API data using a decentralized, fault tolerant and platform-agnostic architecture

Users of our TxHash.com Tracker Service will be charged a service fee. Part of these fees will be redistributed among node operators that are using our TxHash Network plugin.

By open-sourcing and abstracting our current infrastructure into a fully decentralized, cross-DLT, we are creating a trustless network which can perform all core functionalities of our software as a service.

What’s next?

# Technological Overview & Challenges

Next week, we’ll talk about the technology behind TxHash Network and shed light on inherent problems and limitations for the kind of trustless network we’re building. Of course, we’ll also explain how we will overcome these challenges.

# SaaS Product Updates

Since the release of our SaaS, we have been contacted by many of our users and received positive feedback, but also requests to improve several aspects of our platform. We are currently working hard on new features and we will be releasing important updates in the next weeks.

# Token Sale & Community Bounties

In just one week since the announcement of our token sale and release of our whitepaper, we have been contacted by several investors, we expect to make big announcements very soon.

Finally, we have planned a relevant token allocation to incentivize our community to participate, develop on our platform and spread the world about our project. We can’t wait to announce them. In the meantime join our official Telegram if you want to be the first to know (we just reached 100 members 🎉).

Stay tuned! :)

***

Check out our website. Updates will be posted on our blog, Telegram, Reddit, and Twitter. We welcome feedback from the community and are open to collaborations, so please get in touch.