MultiVAC achieves high performance and scalability by using the sharding technology. But more importantly, how do we select miners for each shard?
Book-keeping nodes play a significant role in the whole blockchain network; in each shard, miners cooperate and coordinate with one another to process transactions, store data, and safeguard security. If miners do not follow the procedures, violate the rules, or conspire for the wrongdoing, in minor cases, data may get lost and transaction data may be tampered while in severe cases, the whole blockchain network might be paralysed with irreparable consequences.
Although it is hard to ensure that all the nodes abide by the agreed data-processing procedure in a distributed blockchain system, it is crucial — for the sake of operational security — to guarantee a certain amount of honest nodes and their proportion in the system. Thus, MultiVAC believes that in selecting miners, sufficient randomness and security must be achieved so as to eliminate the chances of conspiracy; unpredictability must also be ensured in case that miners might get exposed and attacked before the job of book-keeping is done.
Following this logic, MultiVAC uses Verifiable Random Function (VRF) to construct a sophisticated mechanism for miner selection and provides a solution to the problem of selecting nodes safely, efficiently, and randomly for a specific shard where and when a transaction or contract occurs.
VRF is a mathematical tool that provides a random and effective mechanism to select certain nodes in a distributed system; it defines a mathematically-complete random number generator. Analogically, if a company commissions alabour service agent (the VRF model) to hire some accountants (the selected miners) for its book-keeping, to prevent the accountants from conspiracy or coordinated falsification, the agent must select the accountants that are mutual strangers and insist on independent book-keeping. This requires the agent to execute a sufficiently random selection mechanism that is free from external control. Importantly, the agent must also provide certain means for the third party to verify if the selection is random, as to ensure security.
MultiVAC believes that a qualified labour service agent (the VRF model) shall have the following features:
Because there are much less nodes in a single shard than in the whole blockchain network, it is much easier for hackers to attack a shardwith fixed miners, to either tamper transaction or solicit double payments. To prevent this, MultiVAC utilises VRF to constantly exchange miners across the whole network, making attacks on a single shard as difficult as that on the whole blockchain.
To note, though Bitcoin’s POW can ensure a certain degree of randomness when it comes to miner selection, this approach consumes a great amount of electric power and wastes huge resources, with its hashing unable to create value. MultiVAC’s VRF, on the other hand, is mathematically robust and elegant; it not only ensures sufficient randomness, but also reduces the cost of transmission and improves performance. Our VRF has an obvious comparative advantage.
VRF can be applied to node selection, generation of validation challenges, and other issues in the blockchain system. It safeguards book-keeping security and prevents miners from coordinated wrongdoing. Besides, BLS used in Algorand and Difinity and Ouroboros Praos used in Cardano are also based on VRF, a solid proof of VRF’s technical and application value.
About MultiVAC:
MultiVAC is High-Throughput Flexible Blockchain Platform based on Trusted Sharding Computation. It’s a next-generation public blockchain platform built for integration with large-scale decentralized applications (dApps). As a core aspect of the protocol, developers can customize parameters for consistency, availability and partition tolerance, providing a high degree of user autonomy over the blockchain infrastructure.
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