How Idena works

Proof of person

The Idena network allows for a proof of humanity and proof of uniqueness for its participants. We call it Proof-of-Person (PoP). Idena does not require any personal data sharing, does not reveal a person’s identity, and does not need a third-party identification center. Idena is based on a network of people mutually validating their humanness and uniqueness. How is it possible?

Idena employs regular checkpoint rituals — synchronous validation sessions — to certify a participants’ humanness for the consequent epoch. The validation requires solving of “flips-puzzles” easy for a human, difficult for a bot.

Fig 1. Idena validation flow for a single epoch

The uniqueness of participants is proven by the fact that they must solve flip synchronously. Flips are decrypted at the same time worldwide. A single person is not able to validate herself multiple times because of the limited timeframe for the answers submission.

After the validation session is over, the network reaches consensus about the new list of validated participants, and the date of the next validation session is scheduled. The bigger the network is, the less frequently the validation sessions happen.

The validation status of a participant is not forever. It expires when the next epoch starts. Participants should prolong their validation status for every new epoch.

To be allowed to take part in the next validation round, the participant must provide a certain number of newly created flips.

To join the network, a new person must get an invitation from a validated participant.

Idena blockchain

The Idena blockchain is based on a proof-of-person Sybil control mechanism. Every validated participant has an equal voting power in the network to produce blocks and validate transactions. Randomly selected participants generate block proposals and broadcast them into the network. A random committee is selected to reach consensus about whether to include a block into the blockchain.

Blockchain scalability

Unlike many blockchains that utilize centralization to increase capacity, we solve the scalability problem by exaggerating decentralization. It might be considered as a counterintuitive approach because of the well-known “Scalability-Security-Decentralization” trilemma. However, Idena offers decentralization-based scalability without sacrificing security.

Idena provides a secure way to run multiple sub-chains in parallel driven by different sets of independent participants in a process called sharding. A network with millions of nodes driven by diverse people could be safely split into thousands of groups (shards) processing transactions at the same time.

Decentralization

The Idena protocol formalizes the notion of the human on the blockchain. We believe that it brings decentralization to a new level and supports the creation of a fair consensus by avoiding network centralization despite the nature of capital to concentrate. The Idena network is truly decentralized since every node is linked to a single person.

Technically, an account can be sold and bought. However, the Idena protocol introduces economic incentives to prevent participants from doing that. The person who sells an account is able to kill the cryptoidentity right after it was sold to unlock unspendable coins frozen in a special wallet linked to the account.

Minting

Idena enables democratic access to mining: Neither expensive mining hardware nor a bunch of money for stake is needed, but rather an average laptop that is online.

All validated participants are encouraged to do useful work for the network (hosting their nodes, creating and solving flips, inviting new users, and so on). This resource sharing is rewarded with a universal basic income (UBI). The UBI for a single participant is enough to cover the fees for 1000 transactions on the Idena blockchain per day.

Governance

The Idena network will have various types of internal governance mechanisms: network improvements proposals (soft forks); network upgrade proposals (hard forks); global fund proposals, and allocations.