The Internet of Services — Intro to our Tech

To start things off:

· You’ll find our website here

· Our whitepaper is available here

· Our GitHub is available here

· You can follow our twitter for major updates here

· And you can get involved and chat with the team on Reddit here (keep an eye out for our upcoming AMA with the tech team)

What is IOS?

In our vision, the IOS (Internet of Services) is a next-generation blockchain technology that provides the network infrastructure to support a service-oriented ecosystem. The IOS platform not only provides its users a completely decentralized way to exchange online services and digital goods, but also enables developers to deploy large scale dApps with the ability to support massive number of users. With a series of groundbreaking innovations, such as EDS (Efficient Distributed Sharding) and Believable-First consensus approach, we are able to increase the system’s throughput enormously while guaranteeing security.

What does that mean?

We are building a blockchain platform that will function like a mixture of a decentralized Alibaba and a decentralized BitTorrent. Since the conception of Bitcoin in 2008, blockchain technology has been limited by technical design which in general suffered from large fees and limited computational capacity.

By implementing several technological breakthroughs, IOS is determined to solve those longstanding problems and bring blockchain into widespread use. IOS will provide infinite new possibilities for online service providers to serve their customer base. Online service providers will be able to easily deploy independent DAPPs to realize sophisticated applications including but not limited to: decentralized virtual goods and services markets, cloud computing, file storage, e-commerce, online gaming, gambling, prediction markets, virtual assistant service, online advertising and more!

The innovative IOS infrastructure relies on several innovations including: HUDS (Hyper Universe Distributed System), EDS (Efficient Distributed Sharding) and PoB (Proof-of-Believability).

Hyper Universe Distributed System

The IOS aims to provide a blockchain capable of hosting a wide range of services providers, from independent small business owners to enterprises like Amazon or Alibaba. With that in mind, an efficient way to distribute content and hosting data is critical. The IOS provides a reliable distributed storage and subscription mechanism on P2P networks — Hyper Universe Distributed System (HUDS). Both users and service providers can store files or metadata on multiple nodes in the network, without downtime and censorship. The IOS has also created a distributed index so that service messages can be broadcasted to subscribers. With the help of HUDS, users are able to search for a specific service or application within the IOS ecosystem. The ability to distribute information and data is an important feature the IOS ecosystem supports.

Efficient Distributed Sharding

We developed EDS based on the sharding technique widely adopted in distributed systems and databases to enable parallel transaction processing. Inspired by the classic “Divide and Conquer” principle in computer science, sharding is a technique that partitions the entire IOS network into certain numbers of subspaces called shards. We can consider each shard as a miniature network that runs its own consensus protocol in parallel. Instead of having the entire network validating the same set of transactions, subsets of transactions can be handled by various consensus groups simultaneously. Therefore, the throughput of the system can be significantly enhanced even if the size of the network and number of transactions grow rapidly. Moreover, in order to ensure the network is divided homogeneously, we have developed a Bias-Resistant Distributed Randomness protocol in order to introduce unbiased and transparent randomness into the sharding process.

Consensus Mechanisms

In the IOS system, IOS Token, like tokens in other blockchain systems, serve as the medium of exchange for all transactions and commission fees. More importantly, IOS also plays a critical role in calculating a user’s believability score. All IOS tokens will be generated in the Genesis Block. In the IOS ecosystem, IOS tokens can be used for:

• Payments: For services and goods provided by merchants and community members.
• Commission: Payment to validators as compensation for running smart contracts, processing messages and transactions, and using resources shared by the general ecosystem. The commission fees incentivize the validators and prevents malicious users from damaging the interests of the community through excessive deployment of smart contracts.
• Believability: IOS tokens will be used in the calculation of a user’s believability (explained in the following section).

A major challenge faced by traditional Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanisms is the tendency towards centralizaton. In order to mitigate this risk, we introduce Servi as a measurement of users’ contributions. Servi is a token designed to encourage members to contribute to the continued development of the IOS community. It has the following attributes:

• Non-tradable: Since Servi is not designed as a medium of exchange, Servi can not be traded or exchanged in any way.
• Self-destructive: After validating a block, the system will automatically clear the Servi balance owned by the validator, so that nodes with high believability can take turns in validating blocks, thus ensuring a fair block generation process.
• Self-issuance: Servi will be generated and deposited to user’s account automatically after certain contributions, such as providing community services, evaluating services provided by another party, or making other special contributions.

Traditional blockchain systems have an inherent trade-off between safety and throughput, depending on shard size. A system with a large number of small shards delivers better performance but provides less resiliency against bad actors, and vice versa. In order to break the trade-off in a way that maintains safety and increases throughput, we propose an innovative Proof-of-Believability (PoB) consensus protocol for the IOS.

PoB is a randomized Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol - believability factors include IOS token balance, Servi balance, reviews, and user behaviors, and its range is (-1,+1). We use a faster graded Byzantine Fault Tolerance mechanism, that allows for a set of nodes to decide on the next block. A key aspect of Proof-of-Believability is that these nodes are selected randomly using algorithmic randomness based on input from previously generated blocks. By design, accounts with higher Servi, more IOS tokens, and better reviews are more likely to be selected as the next validators and beneficiaries of the newly generated blocks.

Going Forwards

For a more complete vision of what IOS is doing, please read through our whitepaper here. We are so excited to grow the IOS ecosystem throughout 2018 and look forward to hearing your questions and feedback!