HNB blockchain system‘s mission is to serve the real economy and accelerate the mobility and efficiency of resource allocation. It’s essential for HNB consensus algorithm to meet the business requirements such as security, efficiency, and fair participation.
The design of the HNB consensus algorithm is based on the latest developments in blockchain technology areas and project implementation experience.
According to the current blockchain consensus algorithm research, mainstream analysis and studies are to address the impossible Triangle problem. CAP theorem states that any distributed system cannot have Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance simultaneously. The trade-off has to be made to address 2 out of 3. Based on HNB project team’s research, the current consensus algorithm focuses on three core characteristics of Security, Decentralization, and Efficiency. SDE Triangle is shown as following:
Algorand is a blockchain protocol proposed by Professor Silvio Micali of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in 2016. It is mainly to solve the waste of the power of the POW consensus protocol adopted by Bitcoin blockchain, inefficiency for easy forking and long confirmation time. Therefore, Professor Silvio Micali proposed a new consensus protocol BA* in the Algorand blockchain agreement. The objectives are:
1. Low energy consumption and the technical resources involved in the consensus consumption in the system are low.
2. Democratization, there will be no “miners” group similar to the Bitcoin blockchain system.
3. The probability of fork is low, less than one trillion.
4. High Scalability: can support the operation of blockchain system with tens of thousands of nodes.
Under current HNB application scenario and economic model, efficiency is the priority so that HNB platform will be able to support the large numbers of concurrent transactions. Massive real-time transactions cannot tolerate long confirmation time. At the same time, the system operating around payments, while the low latency is emphasized, shall not cause double-spending problems, the reliability is crucial.
Based on the above analysis and assumptions, HNB architecture embraces an innovative consensus algorithm based on DPoS + Algorand for HNB decentralized economic community blockchain. The election of the consensus group is based on DPoS, and then Algorand algorithm is adopted to perform block generation and guarantees no fork.
HNB consensus algorithm process is shown in the following figure. It is divided into three phases: Delegate Election, Block Proposal and Consensus Block Generation.
During Election phase, all nodes from the entire HNB community will elect the consensus committee members and proposers. Firstly, 99 delegates will be elected based on DPoS with the right to propose the block. Then these 99 delegates are divided evenly into 3 groups, which represents 3 different interest groups, consumer, producer (or merchant) and contributor. The consensus algorithm will elect the proposers from these three major interest groups based on VRF (Verifiable Random Functions) Cryptographic Sortition, to ensure that no single interest group continues to obtain the block proposal rights.
The Cryptographic Sortition selects the proposer each time based on the previous block data information, ensuring the absolute randomness of the proposer’s choice. The attacker cannot predict and modify the next proposers; thus, it improves the system’s fault tolerance.
During the phase of Block Proposal and Consensus Block Generation, HNB architecture adopts Algorand as its core consensus algorithm for the transaction validation process. HNB BA* algorithm uses multiple rounds of interaction to ensure absolute consistency of the final proposed block among accounting nodes. BA* two rounds of voting must be more than 2/3 to enter the next process, which ensures that there will never be consensus partitions or block forks.
The HNB consensus algorithm can effectively balance security, consensus efficiency, and scalability to provide reliable, efficient, durable, and stable services to HNB’s large business community.
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