PoS project analysis: EOS

There is much to write about the development history of the PoS consensus mechanism, because there are too many variants derived from it, and the designers of each project always have their own whimsy. There has been an article aboutHistory of PoS development, but I think it is necessary to write about the characteristics of each project separately. After all, staking pledge mining is a long-term profitable thing. It is stupid to be optimistic about a project and not do staking, and the mechanism of a project is not enough It is even more blind to buy coins and do staking without understanding.

Of course, the beginning of the PoS project analysis series must write about EOS. The big brother of this PoS project with the largest market value today (ETH is optimistically estimated to be upgraded to PoS for a year), and the super node election was also in the limelight. Its consensus mechanism, voting The design of the mechanism has had a strong impact on subsequent PoS projects.

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EOS consensus mechanism: DPoS+BFT

The EOS consensus algorithm has undergone an upgrade, and the earliest adopted pure DPoS, just like the consensus mechanism adopted by its founder Daniel Larimer (BM) in his first two projects Bitshares and Steem, users hold coins by mortgage Obtain voting rights and vote for nodes to help verify transactions and generate blocks.

Based on the experience of Bitshares, BM set the number of supernodes participating in the verification of blocks to as few as 21. He believes that the small number of nodes will help the community to supervise each node, while Bitshares holders do not Enough attention to scrutinize their 100 principals, resulting in weakened decision-making power. Of course, the small number of super nodes has further aroused criticism of the low degree of decentralization of EOS.

The consensus mechanism after the EOS upgrade is generally called the BFT-DPoS mechanism, which incorporates the Byzantine fault-tolerant algorithm, that is, after the block-producing node generates the block, it will be sent directly to all other nodes, and more than 2/3 of the nodes will verify and sign and return the given After the block node can confirm the block, the block confirmation means that the block will not be forked again, that is, the transaction is confirmed.

This change in the consensus mechanism has brought good results to the performance of EOS. The consensus mechanism mainly affects four issues:

Under the BFT-DPoS mechanism, the 21 super nodes selected by voting will produce blocks sequentially according to the order of the shortest distance of geographical location (to avoid excessive network transmission time), one block is generated every 0.5s, and each node produces 6 blocks Blocks, 21 nodes complete a block for a round. From the generation of the block to the return and confirmation of signature verification by other nodes, the time required will not exceed 1 second, which means that the transaction can be confirmed in less than 1 second, and there will be no problems such as forks and double spends.

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Node and Reward Mechanism

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Data sourced from eosauthority.com/voting

As of August 5, 2019, according to EOSAuthority statistics, the actual number of votes exceeded 316 million, accounting for 30.9% of the total circulation of more than 1 billion, and the total staking ratio was 48.23%.

The inflation rate designed in the EOS mechanism is 5%, but only 1% is used to reward nodes (the other 4% is reserved for other uses, but I haven’t figured out what to use, so it has been destroyed a few months ago). At present, the total volume of EOS is roughly 1 billion, and the additional issuance can be roughly calculated as 10 million.

Of the 1% rewards, 25% will be distributed to supernodes as block rewards, and the remaining 75% will be distributed as voting rewards by supernodes and candidate nodes according to the proportion of votes, provided that the candidate nodes get at least 100 EOS per day income. According to the statistics of EOSbeijing, there are currently only 68 candidate nodes that can reach this threshold.

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Image courtesy of InfStones

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Voting and staking in EOS

In the graph of EOS voting rate, I can see that there are two ratios of voting rate and stake rate. The difference between the two means that voting and stake are not completely consistent concepts in the EOS ecosystem. Stake first exchanges for CPU and stake. NET resources, each transaction in the EOS ecosystem needs to occupy a certain amount of CPU and NET, so most retail investors pledge their currency holdings in exchange for corresponding main network resources to meet daily needs.

Summarize

Summarize

EOS adopts the BFT-DPoS consensus mechanism, and has completed a good integration of the PBFT algorithm and the DPoS consensus mechanism. A block is produced in 0.5s, and the block confirmation can be completed within 1s. There will be no forks, and the TPS is high.

The total number of votes for EOS is still rising, and the proportion of votes has reached a relatively high level. Since the inflation rate used to reward nodes is only 1%, the calculated annualized rate of return for each vote of a candidate node is only 1.5%. about. However, due to the high price of EOS, the income is still considerable, and the group base that is optimistic about the future development of EOS is also relatively large, which also causes the proportion of EOS pledges to remain high.

However, at present, EOS node rebates to voters are still regarded as bribery, and almost no nodes publicly rebate, so EOS holders who want to participate in staking mining like other PoS public chain holders need to observe the public opinion trend of the EOS community .