text"The first year of the public chain",byEOS,byTRON、BytomThe public chain represented by the main network was launched in June 2018. In addition,DeFiIt is very hot, and the performance of Ethereum is eye-catching, and the scenery is excellent for a while, but the performance problems exposed under the huge traffic are still open to discussion.

text「Google」With the emergence of killer applications, people have not felt too many real changes brought about by the blockchain, and the gap between ideals and reality has returned. People began to rationally think about the current problems and future roads of the public chain.

Decentralization and efficiency issues have become the core issues that all projects participating in the public chain competition need to solve first.

textSuper nodes have become a compromise way to solve the above problems.

What is a super node?

Before explaining the super node, let's talk about the meaning of the node. The blockchain network is managed by many servers to store information and verify each other. These servers are nodes. The production of all new blocks, as well as the verification and accounting of transactions, and broadcasting them to the entire network for synchronization are all completed by nodes. All nodes will strive for accounting rights and obtain accounting rewards from the system mechanism.

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Most of the new-generation blockchain public chains are based on the next-generation bookkeeping algorithm, which is what we often call the consensus mechanism. There are three common blockchain consensus mechanisms: "Proof of Work PoW", "Proof of Stake PoS" and "Delegated Proof of Stake DPoS".

The biggest feature of this updated and iterative algorithm is: there are multiple super-center calculations, which summarize everyone's bookkeeping rights, perform blockchain-wide network bookkeeping, and selectively give back to the community after receiving rewards. This kind of super center is a super node.

Super node candidates are selected by voting. You need to have a highly autonomous and large-scale community with fans and operational capabilities, and you need to have a large number of public chain tokens to participate in the election. Those selected can get token rewards from the main chain development foundation and value-added fees based on this node, such as "handling fee" income for functions such as issuing coins, setting up smart contracts, and data storage.

As the core participants of the public chain ecosystem - super nodes, what is their development status? The following will analyze and compare the mainstream public chains to restore the current status of the real public chain nodes.

DPoS consensus mechanism super node

The DPoS consensus mechanism is the most representative public chain EOS. The EOS public chain was founded by well-known blockchain developers ByteMaster and others, aiming to create an enterprise-level blockchain application platform. According to data from CoinMarketCap, the market capitalization of EOS reached 2.17 billion US dollars, ranking fourth, after Bitcoin, Ripple, and Ethereum. This is the highest market capitalization ranking achieved since the birth of EOS.

text. It can be easily understood as a network self-governance model similar to a general meeting of shareholders.

The main working principle of DPoS is that each shareholder has corresponding influence according to its shareholding ratio, and the voting result of 51% of shareholders will be irreversible and binding. The challenge is to achieve 51% approval through a timely and efficient method. In order to achieve this, each shareholder can authorize their shares to a representative, and the top 100 representatives with the most votes will generate blocks in turn according to the established schedule, and each representative is allocated a time period to generate blocks .

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The current number of nodes in the EOS public chain

At present, there are 21 EOS public chain super nodes and 79 backup nodes, all of which are produced by fair and just voting. If the 21 node representatives cannot perform their duties, for example, when it is their turn to work, they fail to generate blocks in time, they will be delisted, and the community will elect new super nodes to replace them.

EOS is a community-driven project, so the number of super nodes is not static. If the number of super nodes cannot meet the project development, community members can vote to increase the number of super nodes.

EOS super node income

The annual increase rate of the entire EOS network: 5% (about 50 million EOS), of which 1% is obtained by super nodes, and the remaining 4% is used for fund reservation, which has been destroyed through the proposal.

In the income of EOS, block rewards (0.25%) and vote rewards (0.75%) are given to 21 master nodes, and vote rewards (0.75%) are given to backup nodes. It can be inferred that the main super node is 508,700 EOS/year, and only 22 to 77 backup nodes have rewards, that is, an average of 48,700 EOS/year. Based on the current EOS currency price: 17 yuan, the annual income of the EOS main super node It is about 8.5 million RMB, and the average annual income of the candidate nodes is about 820,000 RMB.

EOS nodes are open to the world, the competition is very fierce, and super nodes suffer serious losses. In addition, the price of EOS currency has not risen sharply. From the design of DPoS and EOS official policy on the so-called "bribery votes", there is almost no chance for currency holders to participate.

At the same time, projects that use the DPoS consensus algorithm include well-known public chains such as EOS Force, EOSC, Yuanchain, Tron, GXT, IOST, ONT, and QOS.

The supernodes under the DPoS formula mechanism enable a decentralized voting mechanism, which is more democratized than other consensus algorithms, and it is not easy to be monopolized by the big players in the currency circle. In addition, due to the reduction in the number of nodes, they rely on the supernode algorithm , the efficiency of task execution will be higher.

The excellent public chain under the PoW consensus mechanism is BTC. BTC was created and mined by Satoshi Nakamoto in January 2009, with the purpose of creating a decentralized payment system. In 2008, the price of Bitcoin (BTC) was less than 1 cent, and now the price has soared to $18,467, an increase of more than 7.62 million times. At present, the market value of Bitcoin has reached 2.33 trillion yuan, ranking first.

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(PoW workload proof flow chart)

In fact, in the Bitcoin blockchain network, there are also block producers and de facto "super nodes". The work of a Bitcoin node is to package transactions to form blocks, perform mining calculations to obtain bookkeeping rights, and verify blocks that other nodes declare successful mining. Due to the centralization of Bitcoin mining, a small number of large mining farms have become the de facto "block producers", and the benefits of obtaining super nodes will be greater. The difference is that in Bitcoin's blockchain network, anyone can access it and become a node instead of campaigning. Because competition happens all the time in mining calculations.

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BTC super node income

The income of BTC super nodes is generated by mining. In the early days of Bitcoin development, mining was less difficult, and anyone could become a "super node" on any computer. At that time, the block reward for mining was 50 BTC per block. At today's price, each block is amazing. $923,350.

Later, more and more nodes joined, and the role of "super node" changed from an individual to a mine owner. According to the principle of BTC halving in four years, although the Bitcoin block reward has been reduced to 6.75 BTC/block this year, looking for bookkeeping The difficulty is also increasing, but "supernodes" can still earn up to $120,000 worth of income per day by confirming transactions.

Currently, projects using the PoW consensus mechanism include: Frontier (frontier), Homestead (homestead), Metropolis (metropolis), etc.

PoW relies on machines to perform mathematical operations to obtain bookkeeping rights, which consumes a lot of resources, has a high consensus mechanism, and is weak in supervision. At the same time, every time a consensus is reached, the entire network needs to participate, and the performance efficiency is relatively low. In terms of fault tolerance , allowing 50% of the nodes in the entire network to fail, the advantages and disadvantages are obvious.

PoS consensus mechanism super node

Under the PoS consensus mechanism, the first to bear the brunt is the ETH public chain. The launch of the official testnet of ETH2.0 makes it the most popular public chain at present, bar none. The goal of Ethereum is to create a platform-level application, which is a tool that can connect various applications and various Dapps. At present, the market value of Ethereum is 25.6 billion US dollars, accounting for 9.6% of the market value, ranking second.

The POS consensus mechanism is a system for distributing interest based on the amount and time of currency held by the holder. The core logic of the POS mechanism is that whoever holds the currency has control over the network; the longer who holds the currency, the greater the probability of mining the currency.

Therefore, the super nodes of the Ethereum public chain do not need to participate in the election, whoever has the greater computing power will become a super node. For now, the owners with the most computing power are enterprise-level mining pools. In DeFi applications, liquidity mining allows everyone to become a "super node", and they can participate in mining and obtain income by staking.

ETH super node income

Under the POS consensus mechanism, the income of ETH super nodes can be comprehensively analyzed from the amount of ETH held, the amount of locked positions, and computing power.

1) The long-term lock-up ratio exceeds 57%

Currently, more than 57% of Ethereum addresses have held coins for more than a year. Specifically, there are currently 28.39 million addresses and 59.26 million ETH have been locked for more than a year. This data may reflect the optimistic attitude of Ethereum holders towards the market outlook. in. Cryptocurrency asset management company Grayscale Investments Grayscale Trust locked 2.635 million ETH.

2) The amount of locked positions in DeFi reached a new high

DeFi is the flagship of the Ethereum ecosystem. The current locked-up amount of ETH in DeFi is 7 million. As far as stable coins are concerned, there are currently a total of 17 billion US dollars of stable coins issued on Ethereum. Among them, USDT accounts for 2/3, exceeding 12 billion US dollars.

3) The computing power is approaching the historical peak

The data in the figure shows the Hash computing power of Ethereum. It can be seen that in the past six months, the mining computing power of Ethereum has continued to increase, from 176 TH/s in late June to the current 266.38 TH/s, TH/s Indicates the amount of hash operations that can be run per second (THash is the unit), and indicates the size of the computing power value. The current Ethereum network computing power is also close to the historical high value, and the current mining difficulty is 3.56 P. The higher the difficulty of mining, the more cost to produce a block.

4) Nearly 80% of Ethereum addresses are profitable

Although as ETH2.0 approached the Phase 0 phase of the beacon chain creation stage, many third-party mortgages and token holders began to deploy the Staking market to participate in ETH2.0 mining. Currently 742,432 ETHs are locked in the ETH storage contract, which has met the minimum requirement of depositing 524,288 ETHs to start the ETH 2.0 phase. It is reported that the public external verification nodes of the Matic Network side chain represented by POS will start on December 15 based on the public chain. At present, its side chain has nearly 100 external nodes, and the verification interface will be opened to community nodes to supplement its network. The backbone top-level validators deployed in phase 2.

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To sum up, evaluating the success of a public chain project largely depends on whether its community is prosperous and whether it has the ability to promote the development of the ecology. Node elections and super nodes are very helpful to build a more authentic, democratic, fair, autonomous, and benign community.