The avalanche protocol for public offering will be launched tonight, and the protocol layer will enter 3.0 first
Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)
Produced | Odaily (ID: o-daily)
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A new consensus protocol supported by V God, a16z and Polychain
If you have been in the chain circle for a long time, you may have heard of the 0x protocol, the orchid protocol... what is the avalanche protocol Ava?
First define: Avalanche protocol Ava is a new consensus mechanism that combines the advantages of "classic Byzantine consensus protocol that relies on communication transmission" and "Satoshi Nakamoto consensus protocol that relies on proof-of-work to create a chain structure". The Byzantine consensus protocol has weak scalability, weak robustness, and Nakamoto consensus has high latency, low throughput, and excessive resource consumption.
(Odaily Note: "Robustness" refers to the characteristics of the control system to maintain certain other performances under certain parameter perturbations, that is, the robustness of the system, which is the key to ensuring the survival of the system in abnormal and dangerous situations.)
The reason why low latency and high throughput can be achieved under the premise of ensuring robustness is that the avalanche protocol Ava and similar protocols are based on a lightweight network sampling mechanism and support a large number of devices in terms of scalability.
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Professor Emin Gün Sirer
In that era, P2P download tools became popular, the most famous of which was BitTorrent, which was called "BT download" by Chinese netizens. The most important feature in BitTorrent is that each node can not only download files, but also need to pay its own bandwidth to upload files, so as to help more nodes in the network achieve faster download speeds. However, some leeching nodes only download but not upload, which will cause network congestion.
Professor Emin Gün Sirer said that at the beginning of the design of the Karma system, it was hoped that the actual workload of each participant would be tokenized through the PoW mechanism, so as to build a sustainable development system.
Before inventing the "Karma" virtual currency system and getting involved in the field of cryptocurrency, Professor Emin Gün Sirer also worked at Bell Labs. Bell Laboratories is a well-known communications technology research institution, originally established by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). Professor Emin Gün Sirer was responsible for building the large-scale operating system Plan 9 at Bell Labs, working with Rob Pike and others who later went to Google and invented the Go language.
The founder's glamorous background and professional ability naturally attracted a large wave of institutional investors for his latest project.
In 2019, the avalanche protocol Ava received US$6 million in financing from a16z, Polychain Capital and other institutions. On June 25 this year, AVA Labs announced the completion of a $12 million private placement of AVAX tokens, led by five funds including Galaxy Digital, Bitmain, Initialized Capital, NGC Ventures, and Dragonfly Capital, Fundamental Labs, Continue Capital And other institutions and individuals with capital.
Just on July 3, AVA Labs announced that it has received strategic investment from IOSG Ventures, and IOSG will also serve as the exclusive strategic cooperation consultant for AVA Labs in China.
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The technical implementation path of the third generation consensus protocol
Professor Emin Gün Sirer called the avalanche protocol Ava the "third-generation consensus protocol" because it is not only more decentralized than the previous two generations (Byzantine Fault Tolerant Consensus Protocol and Nakamoto Consensus Protocol), but also has very high performance. amazing.
Go back a little in history.
A Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocol, co-developed in 1982 by two well-known computer scientists (also Turing Award winners), Leslie Lamport and Barbara Liskov. The protocol adopts the bookkeeping principle of "permission to vote, minority obeying the majority", with a 33% fault tolerance rate. The advantages are obvious, fast settlement and secured transactions.
However, its disadvantages are also obvious:
Cannot scale beyond 1000 nodes. This is because the communication cost of the protocol is proportional to the quadratic of the number of nodes (ie: O(n²));
The protocol requires everyone in the network to be aware of all other participants.
So in 2009, the Nakamoto Consensus Protocol (also known as Proof of Work, POW) emerged. Satoshi Nakamoto proposed the new protocol and demonstrated its unique robustness.
Under this consensus protocol, we don't need to know all the nodes participating in the network. At any time, any node can leave or join, and any miner can propose a block and participate in the system.
As such, it can be scaled to a large number of nodes all over the world, attracting a large number of participants. Bitcoin transactions thrived.
However, in addition to rapid expansion, it also has natural shortcomings, especially:
Transactions are processed slowly, on average, users have to wait around 10–60 minutes for their transactions to be confirmed on-chain;
The throughput is limited, and BTC can only process about 3–7 transactions per second, which greatly restricts the realization of its goal as a world currency;
The energy consumption is huge, and the power consumption of the BTC network is about equivalent to the energy of four Chernobyl nuclear power plants, all of which are spent on "useless" calculations.
The avalanche protocol Ava combines the characteristics of the non-Byzantine consensus algorithm and the Nakamoto consensus algorithm, and has obvious advantages.
Specifically, the avalanche protocol Ava and similar protocols establish a metastable consensus through repeated sampling operations on the network. After the event is created and sent to the verifier node, each node will randomly select a fixed number of adjacent nodes Inquiry, if most nodes describe the same event, then the judgment is true, if most nodes give different answers, then switch the content of the event, repeated sampling will be performed multiple times until convergence is achieved.
For example, suppose each node contacts five adjacent nodes, and the content of the information is to choose red or blue. From the perspective of the initial node, these five nodes are either red or blue, with a probability of 50% to 50%. The nodes are fair, and the nodes will continue to repeat this process, so that red or blue is selected, and it will not change after the selection; then the initial node will obtain a color according to the weighted result of everyone's choice, and then each participating node in the network As the initial node repeats this process, as the process continues to repeat, a red or blue tendency will be generated, and then the entire network will obtain a consensus color.
The figure above is a public network based on the avalanche protocol Ava, and one node randomly transmits an instruction message to five nodes. And these 5 nodes are the aforementioned quorum k nodes. These 5 nodes are instructed to choose one of two colors (red and blue).
The 5 nodes randomly represent their own results. From the point of view of the sending node, the consensus result of the 5 nodes it sees must be either red or blue.
Therefore, in this specified number of nodes k(5), the consensus result reached by the node sending the information is red. As a result, the selected nodes will not change in the subsequent process.
Then the nodes of the whole network repeat this process all the time, which is a bit like a sampling process. The core idea of the protocol is to keep repeating this sampling process during the consensus process.
After two or three rounds, the consensus result of the network nodes may still be half red and half blue, and the number is not much different. But the odds of such a tie decay exponentially. Because the whole process is more and more inclined to the uniform result, the network will automatically perceive the color to change to another color. And this result change will change faster and faster in the later stage of transmission until the color of the entire network reaches a consensus.
Similar to this consensus process: using a DAG structure to achieve a fuzzy BFT consensus. However, each node in the DAG network does not need to interact with all other nodes. It only needs to interact with a certain number of nodes and collect feedback from other nodes in the network to reach a probabilistic consensus.
This consensus mechanism is not like the classic consensus that requires nodes to understand other nodes in the network, and there is no need to worry about the communication complexity caused by too many nodes. When the number of nodes is small, the number of sampling can be increased to ensure the security of the network. When the number of nodes is large, there is no need to worry that the network is too large to affect efficiency.
Every node in the network is equal, as long as it is allowed to participate in the network, it is a validator. If there is a double spend, then there will be a contradictory tendentious result, both transactions of the double spend will be lost, and the double spend transaction cannot affect other transactions.
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Interpretation of the AVAX Token Public Sale
According to the official announcement, the avalanche protocol Ava will start the token AVAX public offering at 22:00 on July 8, Beijing time, and the public offering will continue until 22:00 on July 22. The total number of tokens sold in this public sale is a maximum of 17 million, accounting for 4.72% of the mainnet supply.
Judging from the official issuance of tokens, the total circulation of AVAX is 720 million, of which 50% of the tokens - 360 million will be used for staking rewards, and the other 360 million will be used for private placements, public offerings, teams and Foundation and testnet rewards, etc.
For users who want to participate in the public sale, there are three purchase options:
Option A1: Sell at a price of USD 0.5 per piece, unlocked quarterly within one year, and the purchase limit is USD 25,000.
Option A2: Sell at a price of $0.5 per piece, unlocked quarterly within one and a half years, with no purchase restrictions.
Option B: Sell at $0.85/piece, no lock-up period, maximum purchase limit of $5,000.
The detailed supply and past fundraising prices are as follows:
It is worth noting that all unsold tokens in options A1 and B will be transferred to option A2 after 22:00 on July 21. Unsold items after 24 hours will be donated to the community and developer endowment funds.
In addition, whether it is a seed round, private placement or public placement, the lock-up period is emphasized. This lock-up period starts from the launch of the mainnet (officially expected to be this fall).
References:
References:
Lianwen: "Avalanche consensus protocol inventor Emin Gün Sirer: Our goal is Wall Street"
EVALUAPE1: "AVA: Academic Public Chain Favored by A16z and Other Institutions"
Encryption Valley Live: "Deep | Consensus Mechanism 3.0 Avalanche Protocol Research"
Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Cryptocurrencies, Team Rocket, 2018
