Consensus mechanism of public chain technology,on-chain scaling and Layer2 off-chain scaling
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Author: Lunaray security Team
No matter how it develops, the technical source and representative of the entire blockchain are public-chains. Almost all application scenarios are also continuously expanded based on the development of public-chains technology.
0x01 consensus mechanism
Because the biggest problem of consensus protocol is how to achieve a balance between security and efficiency.
Under the premise of ensuring security, there are about four ideas to improve performance, one of which is to adopt a new consensus protocol: the researchers proposed the Thunderella algorithm of the PoW mechanism, the Algorand protocol of the PoS mechanism, the Ouroboros algorithm, and the Sleepy Model-based algorithm. PoS consensus, Proof of Space and other new algorithms.
0x02 On-chain scaling
Sharding may be the most direct and effective way to expand the Public- chain, but it is also a complicated method.
If the public chain is compared to a highway, sharding is like diverting cars from one lane to multiple lanes and moving forward in parallel, which can alleviate the congestion problem on the road.
However, to achieve sharding is a complex project, because it needs to start directly on the road, and there is a lot of resistance.
Although the sharding public-chain represented by Zilliqa has already realized the function of transaction sharding.
However, the current public-chains led by Ethereum all support smart contracts. To improve the performance of these public-chains, it is necessary to perform contract sharding, or state sharding is the next difficult problem to be overcome by sharding technology. At present, many projects are working towards this direction.
0x03 Layer2 off-chain scaling
If sharding is described as moving on the road and dividing into multiple lanes, then the off-chain expansion technology, taking state channels and side-chains as examples, is like digging subways and building viaducts.
The most well-known application of state channels is Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, which has been growing rapidly recently.
The side-chain technology can be represented by Ethereum’s Plasma，There are also several off-chain scaling projects, such as Celer Network, Liquidity Network, Truebit
