A little bit of history

Steve Jobs said “ Good artists copy, great artists steal” and that is true, especially in the blockchain world. Bitcoin was revolutionary in 2009 becasue it let people to make electronic transactions without relying on trust. Satoshi Nakamoto proposed Consensus mechanism which turned ordinary network users into validators. But it has been almost 10 years since he presented POW idea, other consensus mechanisms have been created, allowing for better scalability, more time and electrical efficiency.

Consensus

If you don’t know what conesensus is we can shorten its description to three points. Consensus is an algorithm which tells:

How are decisions made? How does anything get done? Who does it?

Apex decided to use a solution called Delegated Proof of Stake created by Daniel Larimer in 2014(https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=558316.0) and proven by many projects like: Bitshares, Steem which is mostly known as Steemit.com or even recently released and hyped EOS blockchain. Neo blockchain also uses modified version of DPOS called dBFT( Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance).

DPOS

In Delegated Proof of Stake, token holders vote for Nodes and decide which of them will be Block Producers.

Block producers are responsible for grouping transactions into a block and broadcasting it to the network. Later these blocks are validated by validators, anyone who is runing full node is a network validator.

Each block has to be confirmed by majority of the network(block producers) and accepted by all block validators. Before this happens, block is considered as a proposal.

DPOS adventages — it is upgraded democracy

First of all DPOS is the fastest consensus mechanism. In the STEEM blockchain blocks are produced once every 3 seconds and in the EOS blockchain once every 0.5 second. Some might say that DPOS is not decentralized but in my opinion we can compare it to the democracy after upgrades. Democracy is decentralized isn’t it? DPOS is a better version of democracy where community, people can change the politicians(block producers) once they do something bad.

Usually with DPOS all transactions are costless, and nodes are rewarded with freshly mined tokens (There is no max cap). You only need to have some tokens on your account but you will not be charged with any fee for sending a transaction. In Apex all incentives will come from data transaction fees but a number of tokens will be limited.

Also what is very important for Apex, DPOS scales almost without any limits. On http://blocktivity.info/ you can check which blockchain has the highest activity. Top 2 places are taken by DPOS based blockchains Bitshares(over 4 million of transactions in last 24 hours) and Steem(over 1 million of transactions in last 24 hours).

DPOS is economically and environmentally efficient it does not need so much energy as proof of work used by the bitcoin or ethereum(POW uses 0.14% of the global energy consumption) and you don’t have to buy dedicated (ASIC) miners in order to mine DPOS blocks. All you have to do to be a block producer is to run dedicated software on your server machine.

POS — Proof of stake for sidechains

Starting blockchain based on DPOS requires a lot of time and effort of the community. That’s why APEX decided that all sidechains will be runing under POS. Proof of Stake is a consensus algorithm that will let sidechains growth in the scalable manner. POS will be also used in the Ethereum blockchain. Everyone who decided to be a block producer must stake a certain amount of tokens. If a block producer acts in a malicious manner all of his stake is going to get slashed.

DPOS VS DBFT

dBFT algorithm might seems to be a little bit more secure than DPOS but there is no difference at all. In dBFT the majority of block producers (2/3) decides what will be included in the block, while in DPOS one producer decides what will be included in the block and later it must be accepted by the majority. That makes dBFT blockchains “unforkable”. In DPOS the part where majority of network must agree over a block is postponed in time, that what makes DPOS based blockchains are forkable but still they are same secure as dBFT blockchains.

Conclusion

I think that APEX is a solid, well planed platform, based on proven solutions and will deliver breeze in a way of using system which will help to solve main problems of B2C interactions. If you would like to know more about APEX join us on the telegram t.me/APEXcommunity