There are 7 proprietary innovations that deliver Partisia Blockchain’s complete Layer 1+2 Blockchain. In this blog we present the second innovative feature — the sharding model — we call it Iris.
For an overview of all of the 7 features see the Zeus blog. We present each of the 7 innovations with a unique post leading up to TGE on May 31, 2022.
The so-called blockchain trilemma is all about the difficulties in designing a blockchain that can scale to handle any number of transactions without hampering secure decentralization. The key to unlocking this challenge is sharding, which is the art of parallelizing consensus without compromising security:
Partisia Blockchain solves the blockchain trilemma through sharding involving all baker nodes across all shards as a genuine layer 1. This way, sharding does not impact the Poseidon provable consensus model and hence neither diminish decentralization nor the overall threshold security model.
An illustration of the scalable block creation where each shard creates verifiable blocks according to the consensus model presented in the Poseidon blog is provided below. The consolidated blockchain shows how the sharding scales linearly in the number of shards i.e. a blockchain running with three shards can handle three times as many concurrent transactions as a blockchain running without sharding. To see this, note that the consensus process, including the time consuming propagation of messages, is done in parallel and independently across shards. A governance shard keeps track of the shards and distributes the block creation work across the independent shards. Also, the security model ensures that all new nodes are properly represented across all shards and thereby validate every transaction.
This way, the capacity of the Partisia Blockchain can be scaled up to meet any number of transactions per second (TPS). The capacity of a shard is roughly 1,000 TPS and a new shard is just one transaction away. Even in the rare case of a time consuming full BFT reset on one shard, the workload allocated to other shards and the impact on the capacity of the entire blockchain will be marginal only.
Sharding is an integrated part of the initial version of the Partisia Blockchain and will gradually be developed to dynamically adjust for throughput by spinning up new shards on demand exactly as cloud computing allows dynamic load balancing.
For more details, please checkout the yellow paper and software documentation.
Please let us know what you think and stay tuned for the next blog post about our collateralized token bridging, called Hermes.
Thank you to everyone in our community for your support!
Partisia Blockchain Team
There are 7 proprietary innovations that deliver Partisia Blockchain’s complete Layer 1+2 Blockchain. In this blog, we present the first innovative feature — the consensus model — we call it, Poseidon.
For an overview of all of the 7 features see the Zeus blog. We present each of the 7 innovations with a unique post leading up to TGE on May 31, 2022.
A core requirement for any blockchain is to establish trustworthy consensus about the shared distributed ledger holding information like transactions ordering and smart contracts. Only this way can blockchain replace intermediators in the economy and simplify coordination of tasks, data and trades. Establishing consensus in distributed computing systems has been studied for decades. Although there is no perfect game theoretical solution, the most trusted approach is the so-called Byzantine Fault Tolerance model (BFT). The name comes from the “Byzantine generals problems” where independent generals need to establish common knowledge to succeed. The main problem with naïve BFT is that it is too slow and hampers scalability. Partisia Blockchain, however, provides scalability with BFT through an Eager FastTrack consensus model.
On Partisia Blockchain, transactions are added to the ledger via immediate block creation and executed node by node immediately after signing. Consensus is established in the P2P network where signatures are propagated and aggregated. When a node achieves signatures from ⅔ of all nodes or more, a Proof-of-Justification (PoJ) is established, and the node moves on to evaluate the next block immediately. PoJ also finalizes the transactions in the previous block. Since this process happens as fast as information travels through the P2P network, we call it lightning fast finalization. In rare cases, the FastTrack approach may fail to reach consensus. If this happens, the protocol reset the blockchain through a full BFT style consensus and restart the FastTrack consensus, as illustrated below. This way, the consensus protocol achieves finalization among ⅔ of all nodes as fast as possible, while still backed by a BFT style consensus.
Combined with sharding, scalability is complete as a reset on one shard happens independent of the other shards, but more about that in the next blog on “Iris — complete sharding”.
Another core problem solved by Partisia Blockchain is to ensure that the validators actually construct and validate transactions. This is a general problem for validation based consensus like Proof-of-Stake, which was solved in the Proof-of-Work protocol where miners don’t get paid if they work on a wrong version of the blockchain. A validator on the Partisia Blockchain, however, has to construct a cryptographic proof prior to signing a block. The cryptographic proof is node-specific and proves that the node has signed the executed version of the blockchain.
For more details, please checkout the yellow paper and the software documentation.
Please let us know what you think and stay tuned for the next blog post about our Sharding technology, called Iris.
Thank you to everyone in our community for your support!
Partisia Blockchain Team
There are 7 main features and proprietary innovations that deliver Partisia Blockchain’s complete Layer 1+2 Blockchain. We call it, ZEUS.
In this post, we provide a brief introduction to the 7 main features that define Partisia Blockchain at the launch of mainnet and we will gradually extend and improve on these features as we work our way through the roadmap towards ZEUS 6.0. Each feature will have its own unique post which we will release leading up to mainnet launch.
Poseidon — Provable Fast Track Consensus
Hermes — Collateralized Token Bridging
Apollo — Unified Public and Private Smart Contracts
In this blog post, we provide a brief description of the 7 innovative features that sets Partisia Blockchain apart as a new standard in the blockchain ecosystem.
Partisia Blockchain involves all available nodes in the consensus through an innovative provable fast track consensus model. Transactions are eagerly added to blocks, validated and executed. Cryptographic measures ensure that validation is based on properly constructed blocks prior to signing transactions. The fast consensus model is based on ⅔ of all nodes validating the transactions and finalization is created quickly after block creation and in sub seconds. If the consensus is not properly validated, a proper Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) style consensus is triggered. We call it the Poseidon Consensus Model and claim that this is the fastest consensus model without the security compromises typically seen in the industry.
Partisia Blockchain comes with sharding built into layer 1. The governance shard keeps track of all shards and allocates blocks to the different independent block producing shards to maximize throughput in terms of validated transactions. Each shard runs the Poseidon Consensus Model independently, which means that any issues such as a BFT style reset on one shard does not impact the other shards. Sharding is gradually developed to dynamically adjust for throughput by spinning up new shards on demand. All nodes are involved across all shards hence scalability does not compromise consensus and the basic security of the entire blockchain. We call it Iris Sharding and claim that this is the most scalable blockchain without the security compromises typically seen in the industry.
Cross-chain interoperability is native to Partisia Blockchain with Bring Your Own Coin (BYOC) and token bridges. BYOC brings external liquid tokens as payment to Partisia Blockchain, which economically aligns Partisia Blockchain with partner chains. The entire token bridge is another core innovation. A combined use of a double bookkeeping method, staking as collateral and large scale MPC based selection of Oracle nodes, forms the bridge. The token bridge limits accumulation of financial risk through frequently expiring epochs and MPC tokens as collateral staking. We call it Hermes Bridging and claim that this is the most secure token bridging in the industry.
The most revolutionary and long run contribution by the Partisia Blockchain is the ability to run any privacy-preserving computation in combination with computation on public information. The privacy-preserving computation is provided by zero-knowledge (ZK) computation operated by accredited ZK nodes in known jurisdictions. This enables any mix of public and private applications to be developed on the Partisia Blockchain and it enables any Dapps to be regulatory compliant — even with somewhat conflicting regulation on transparency and data protection. We call this the Athena Zero-Knowledge Layer and claim that we set a new standard for the blockchain ecosystem.
The entire Partisia Blockchain is designed for secure and efficient orchestration of MPC-as-a-Service. The team behind the project has pioneered MPC and delivered commercial grade MPC since 2008. Partisia Blockchain is probably the most ambitious MPC platform and it comes with an extensive set of tools and a new set of MPC protocols called REAL. A core feature is efficient preprocessing that utilizes all the blockchain orchestration of many ZK nodes to the fullest extent to speed up realtime use of MPC. We call this Demeter MPC-as-a-Service and claim that we set a new standard for how to conduct any type of privacy-preserving computations within and beyond the blockchain ecosystem.
Partisia Blockchain is a complete infrastructure that enables decentralized coordination of public as well as private computations. However MPC is a very advanced technology that requires a lot of knowhow to ensure efficient execution and to avoid security breaches. A very significant innovation are the Private Smart Contracts that makes it simple for any developer to tap into MPC-as-a-Service without prior knowledge nor cryptographic experts involved. The expertise and know-how of the Partisia expert team will be gradually built into the smart contract language to move blockchain technologies to an entirely new field of use. We call this Apollo Smart Contracts and set a new standard for how to simply setup highly advanced privacy-preserving computation within and beyond the blockchain ecosystem.
Partisia Blockchain is all about replacing not just the “Coordinator” of information as middleman but also the “Trustee” as a single point of trust and middleman. As any decentralized network, Partisia Blockchain relies on efficient node operators and no dominating numbers of malicious nodes. To grow a strong network of highly trusted efficient nodes, the Partisia Blockchain will gradually evolve into a market for trust — a market that rewards nodes that efficiently validate and propagate information and run MPC-as-a-Service and Token Bridges trusted by the users. Advanced truth-telling and incentive provision has been designed and will gradually be introduced to the network. We call this Mithra Market for Trust and set a new standard for incentive provision in P2P networks.