Idena 2021 community report

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Idena

24 min readJun 14, 2021

Idena is an open-source project started in October 2018 by an anonymous group of like-minded engineers and computer scientists who believe that there is a way to redesign software systems in general and blockchains in particular to achieve greater decentralization and scalability.

This is the Idena community report that covers the project development since the previous report published in February 2020.

Before we start, we want to express deep gratitude to our dear community for supporting the Idena project: for all activity, memes, initiatives, development projects, tweets, bug reports, and even to all the sirs for the IC requests. Thank you all for being unique humans and contributing to Idena!

Overview

For a blockchain to be decentralized, it’s crucially important for regular users to be able to run a node, and to have a culture where running nodes is a common activity.
© Vitalik Buterin, The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

Idena was designed as a global decentralized online authentication system that does not require any personal data disclosure. Today we can claim that the idea is viable and that its implementation by Idena is unique.

There seem to be no prerequisites for alternative solutions to appear, although we actively monitor the market. To date, Idena remains unique, both in the decentralized identity/authentication and in the blockchain space. No other identity projects claim to be decentralized, to preserve privacy, and allow for the identity issuer decentralization at the same time.

The Idena Network is the only fully decentralized and privacy preserving solution.
© Divya Siddarth, Sergey Ivliev, Santiago Siri, Paula Berman, Who Watches the Watchmen? A Review of Subjective Approaches for Sybil-resistance in Proof of Personhood Protocols

We are convinced that blockchain is the only solution to ensure decentralization and accessibility with zero transaction fees for validation. Idena is the only identity-based blockchain. In other identification solutions, blockchain is the identity ledger. In Idena, it is an integral component of the unique human validation protocol.

Though there is still quite a lot planned for the next few years (see the Roadmap section), the key mechanisms are up and running.

X10 network growth

From the last community report in February 2020, the network has grown more than ten times with an average growth rate of 10% per epoch. At present*, the network has 8245 identities compared to 597 in February 2020.

The average age of the network and the number of aged identities of 10 epochs or older also grows over time, which means that the participants stay around longer and keep a longer streak of validations.

The fundamental driver of the network growth is the Idena invitation system. Originally designed as a mechanism to protect the network from Sybil attack, the invitation mechanism acts both as a stimulus and as a limiting factor, ensuring the consistent pace for network growth.

Scalability

The Idena development team was able to support this significant network growth by continually working to ensure its scalability. Introducing the Idena web client has allowed securing a margin for throughput during the most critical periods, namely Idena validation ceremonies, when the number of transactions in the network is maximal.

Community growth and input

Community is in the very DNA of Idena.

Since the last report, the community has grown more than ten times and now includes 26K members on ten different platforms speaking in more than 20 languages. The community is the prime driving power for the Idena ecosystem: people spread invites, develop apps on top of the network and participate in hackathons; generate content and promote Idena at public discussions. This is only the beginning, and we foresee the community only to become more engaged and involved.

Apps

We see unique cryptoidentity as an essential building block of decentralization and Idena as a platform for fully decentralized apps. During the last year, we saw the first actual use cases and Idena-based applications developed by our community. The launch of the Idena predefined smart contracts allowed the implementation of funding for community development projects. As the network grows and becomes more functional, the first use cases emerge: Idena authorization is applied to fight sybils in quadratic funding, make fair airdrops, and create art.

Decentralized governance progress

Our ultimate goal is to provide decentralized means of governance and funding to Idena and any other projects.

This goal got one step closer with introducing oracles for decentralized voting, basic smart contracts for fund management, and fork voting mechanics for protocol governance. Now the network has all tools necessary for implementing DAOs in the Idena ecosystem.

Financials & coins supply

Premint, funding, and vesting

Idena preminted supply was distributed between 4 funds:

Core team fund;
Early investors fund;
Runway fund;
Ambassadors fund.

The initial breakdown structure of funds can be found in the previous community report. Up-to-date distribution and address structure are always available on the Circulating Supply page of the Idena Explorer.

The introduction of timelock smart contracts allowed locking the vested funds. Core team vested funds were transferred to timelock addresses. That is why the address structure of the preminted, funding, and vesting addresses has changed since the previous report.

Initial permit size: 36 000 000 iDNA.

Actual funds size: 20 338 334 iDNA*

Core team fund: 11 500 000 iDNA*

⅓ distributed after minting: 5 750 000 iDNA;
⅓ vested until 2022: 5 750 000 iDNA;
⅓ vested until 2024: 5 750 000 iDNA.

Early investors fund: 2 488 334 iDNA*

⅓ sold at initial round: 2 355 000 iDNA;
⅓ sold** after August 31, 2020: 2 355 000 iDNA;
⅓ vested until August 31, 2021: 2 355 000 iDNA + 133 334 iDNA additionaly vested from runway fund sold to early investors.

Runway fund: 6 080 000 iDNA*

3 000 000 iDNA spent** in 2020;
2 240 000 iDNA spent** in 2021;
6 080 000 iDNA reserved for 2022 funding.

Ambassadors fund: 270 000 iDNA*

95 000 iDNA rewarded to Idena ambassadors;
270 000 iDNA left.

Foundation wallet: 2 700 401 iDNA*

485K iDNA spent on Idena development and promotion since the last report.

Foundation wallet expenses structure, from March 1, 2020, till now*

Zero wallet: 329 673 iDNA*

The zero wallet is designed to fund projects with positive impact proposed by the Idena community. It accumulates 1% of all minted coins.

Currently, the wallet address is locked. There is no private key for the zero wallet address: the network must reach a consensus in order to spend the funds. Governance mechanisms for zero wallet fund allocation are to be established in the future.

Listings

Through the last year, IDNA was listed on two tier-2 and two tier-3 exchanges:

August 11, 2020 — HotBit listing;
September 3, 2020 — ProBit listing;
November 6, 2020 — ViteX listing;
May 6, 2021 — Occe.io listing.

In April 2021 Idena to Binance Smart Chain bridge was introduced.

The bridge allowed to transfer iDNA to BSC and to trade iDNA on any BSC exchange. At the moment of publishing this report, the most popular exchange to trade iDNA on BSC is Pancake Swap.

Over the last year, we have contacted several Tier 1 exchanges, but their listing fees are not feasible for Idena at the current stage. We will be looking for other, more price-efficient listing options. Meanwhile, we want to focus on supporting initiatives on listing and attracting liquidity to distributed exchanges like Pancake Swap. We plan to employ a more active listing strategy only when the Idena network functionality will ensure fundamental demand in iDNA. As we expect, the possible driver of this demand in the near future can be Idena Advertisement Network that is now in active development.

Network stats

Network size

From the last community report in February 2020, the network has grown from 597 to 8283 validated identities, with an average growth rate of 10% per epoch.

Number of identities, March 2020 — June 2021, see Appendix for epoch dates

By now, Idena has more mining nodes than Ethereum and exceeds all known blockchains in the number of validators.

The share of different identity types in the network stays consistent over time despite the identity churn proving the robustness of the ecosystem. The prevailing identity types are Human and Newbie.

Identities status, March 2020 — June 2021, see Appendix for epoch dates

Growth and invitation system

The fundamental driver of the network growth is the Idena invitation system: validated users are incentivized with rewards to invite new users. At the same time, the number of invites per epoch is limited, which creates a natural demand. Originally designed as protection from Sybil attack, the invitation mechanism acts both as a stimulus and as a limiting factor, ensuring the consistent pace for network growth. The share of successful validations for new network members is also stable, fluctuating between 47% and 67%, with 55% on average.

Invites conversion, March 2020 — June 2021, see Appendix for epoch dates

Network age

Identities age, March 2020 — June 2021, see Appendix for epoch dates

Meanwhile, the overall number of identities who ever participated in the validation is much higher than the number of identities with active validated status: 6436 addresses have at least one validation attempt (maybe they failed, but they tried), and 2 addresses have taken part in 63 validations as a maximum.

Address validation attempts, March 2020 — June 2021, see Appendix for epoch dates

The next diagram represents the relation between the age of the address and its number of validation attempts, the brightness of the circle being the number of identities corresponding to that point. The circles near the trend line are the identities that regularly pass the validation. Below the trend line are the identities who sometimes miss the validation. The circles above the trendline are identities that failed the validation or terminated and then started a new validation streak with the same address. That is why the real age of some identities is higher than the length of their last validation streak. So some newbies can be much older than it seems.

Relation between age and number of validation attempts. The brighter the circle, the more identities it represents.

Identity distribution by age shows that the young identities prevail. At the same time, the core of the network (identities with age more than 10 epochs) is growing.

The median age of the network is 4 epochs. 60% of the network is 13 epochs or younger. Only 5% of the identities are older than 27 epochs.

Network age distribution, March 2020 — June 2021, see Appendix for epoch dates

As the trends show, the average network age and the maximum age for the majority of the network grows over time, which means that the participants stay around longer and keep a longer streak of validations.

If you enjoy numbers and analytics, you can also check complex validation reports with identity state graphs, historical trends, and other network data at Idena.today, a service developed by our community members Endogen, Shadow, and their team.

Mining and validation rewards

Since the last report, an average reward for mining and validation per node per epoch has changed from 596 to 116 iDNA. This is caused by the growth of the network: in the Idena economic model, the minting amount is fixed and is distributed between all mining nodes in the network, which encourages early adoption.

Average mining income per node in iDNA and USD, March 2020 — June 2021, see Appendix for epoch dates

At the same time, the USD equivalent of income per node, which can be considered as Idena UBI, isn’t following the same trend. Although volatile, it remains above 10 USD per epoch and peaks up to 30–50 USD. We expect this number to increase with the growth of the network and further ecosystem development as a consequence of the growing fundamental value of the Idena blockchain.

Development: Idena core team

The Idena core development team works on five main repositories:

1. Idena-go — Idena network full node

Latest version: 0.26.1
104 releases
92K lines of code

2. Idena-desktop — Idena Desktop App for Windows, Mac, and Linux

Latest version: 0.24.1
195 releases
68K lines of code

3. Idena-web — Idena Web App for connecting to remote nodes on the go

44K lines of code

4. Idena-indexer — Idena blockchain data collected in a centralized database

46K lines of code

5. Idena-explorer — Idena blockchain explorer with web interface

25K lines of code

Since the last community report, the following components and functions have been added:

Idena Web App;
Shared nodes and shared node marketplace;
Seamless hard fork mechanism and fork voting;
Oracles;
Basic smart contracts;
Sign-In with Idena;
Mining pools;
Many improvements, new features, and updates in the protocol, Desktop App, Explorer, and other main components.

Scalability

Securing the network scalability has always been our priority, and the development team is constantly working on it.

In the past year, the Idena network has grown more than ten times. We have taken the following measures that allowed us to increase the network throughput considerably:

reducing the maximum block size;
reducing the number of candidate block proposed at the same time;
reducing the size of transactions with short session answers;
node performance optimization.

The next step towards increasing network throughput is sharding, and it is one of the priorities for the core team now.

Idena Web App

In January 2021, the Idena Web App was launched and later upgraded with an integrated marketplace for shared nodes. We see it as an important step towards democratizing access to crypto, fair mining for non-tech people, and a solution to make Idena more scalable. One shared node can facilitate the validation for hundreds of users.

Web App bundled with a marketplace for shared nodes has proven itself reliable through several validations handling up to 11% of successful validation participants.

The core team decided to abandon the plan to develop mobile-native apps for Idena in favor of the web app development because of the following reasons:

platform-native mobile app marketplaces are centralized and add unnecessary friction to app distribution and update;
there is no way to guarantee the integrity of the app and keep the source code open.

Nevertheless, we see a lot of potential for the community-driven development of mobile apps and wallets. One good example is the My Idena app developed by Red Dwarf, our community member. Another option for those who want to have an app to store their iDNA coins is Idena-Pocket — a web wallet with Ledger compatibility made by Menxit, another developer from our community.

Pools

Pools and farming were inevitable issues bound to appear in Idena at a certain stage of network growth. Our strategy was to embrace this issue and to use the strengths of pools while keeping the network democratic and preventing voting power accumulation. The solution we proposed was implemented as a part of the hard fork done in March 2020 and allowed users to delegate mining to the pool while limiting the pool voting power to one vote.

43,4% of the validated identities delegate their mining to pools, and 56,6% of network nodes mine independently. The nodes are distributed relatively even between big (17,6%), mid-sized (10,7%) and family pools (15,2%) .

The majority of pools are so-called family pools, while the number of big pools is very low: 86% of the pools are running less than 10 nodes, and only 2,9%, or 12 pools, run more than 50 nodes.

As far as the voting power concentration is avoided, we see the high potential of pools in stimulating the growth of the network.

The pool has to control its participants to ensure successful validation, and the most obvious way to do that is through guidance and education. We also believe that as soon as pool participants have enough knowledge about the network, they will understand the advantage of independent mining and leave the pool.

Protocol improvements

Idena security model

In February 2020, the Idena security model was updated, introducing a longer short validation session (6 flips instead of 5) with its threshold increased to 60%. Other significant changes were introducing the Human status with the stake protection for aged identities and discrimination of identities with the Newbie status.

Aged identities

To encourage aged identities to keep the identity rather than to terminate it, the following improvements were implemented:

allowing identities with Human status to fail validation without being killed;
granting more invitation codes to identities with Human status;
calculating total score based on the last 10 epochs results;
additional flips submission for Verified and Human identities.

As a result, the validation streak for old identities has increased even more, and the average age of the network has increased as well.

AI resistance of flips: Drawing tools in the flip editor

It is easier for AI to recognize objects on photos than on drawings or photos with drawn elements. To decrease the accuracy of image recognition and, consequently, the accuracy of flip solving by AI, we have added drawing and collage tools to the flip editor.

To motivate the users to make AI-resistant flips, we have also implemented reward mechanics for making high-quality flips. We will activate these mechanics as soon as we add flip scoring, which is planned for Q3 2021.

Flip reporting

Flips are the key element of Idena network security. As flips are created by people in a decentralized way, it is necessary to have an efficient system to keep the quality of flips high and prevent unwanted content.

Introduced in January 2020, the flip reporting system was improved in September 2020:

rewards for successful flip reporting were added;
the number of reports available for each user was limited to avoid reporting all flips.

We still see a lot of room for improving the quality of reporting and will introduce more mechanics to stimulate the users to do reporting work during the validation session.

Invitations

Lottery-based rewards for non-spent invitations were implemented to prevent sporadic invitations. This mechanic didn’t work and was replaced with the Spoil Invitation function that discourages public sharing of invitations.

An early invitation model was added to stimulate users to proactively search for quality candidates and reward users who spend more time educating their invitees. Thanks to this model, the invitation activity was distributed more equally throughout the epoch, starting from Epoch 68.

Governance and use cases

Seamless hard fork updates

In October 2020, the network became capable of seamlessly upgrading protocol versions based on the agreement of the network’s majority. From version 0.23.2 of the Desktop App, hard fork voting is available in the Desktop App, and the results are displayed in the Explorer. Now every validated participant is empowered to decide which protocol version they want to support.

Oracles and smart contracts to manage funding

Launching Idena oracles and predefined smart contracts in December 2020 laid the foundation for the decentralized governance we are striving for.

The following types of smart contracts were implemented:

OracleVoting;
OracleLock;
RefundableOracleLock;
TimeLock;
Multisig M-of-N.

These basic smart contracts allow creating votes and unlocking coins based on the results of oracle voting, vesting funds, and managing funds collectively.

At the present moment*, there are:

188 oracle votings created;
75 oracle votings published;
3754 unique identities who took part in oracle votings.

In February 2021, Idena launched a series of hackathons to build dApp websites on top of predefined Idena smart contracts. The hackathons are aimed at bringing use cases to Idena and popularizing Idena smart contracts.

As a result of Hackathon 1, TimeLock and Multisig contracts have been integrated into the latest version of the My Idena mobile app by RedDwarf. The minimal reward of 4K iDNA was released to RedDwarf unconditionally. The amount of additional funding was made a subject of community voting: the funds were blocked using the OracleLock smart contract and a voting was initiated. The community voted for making further improvements in the app to unlock the funds. So the funds will return to the foundation wallet, and a new voting will be initiated after the improvements in the app are made.

Hackathon 2 had no submissions and will be relaunched.

Sign in

Sign-In with Idena, the protocol supporting integration with other services, was introduced in May 2020. Idena’s cryptoidentity can now be used for authentication by a centralized service or website. Depending on the identity status or its total score in the Idena network, the centralized service can grant certain privileges to the owner of the identity.

Idena partnered with Gitcoin and RadicalxChange to launch a hackathon to use the Sign-In with Idena function on a website. As a result, we got many viable projects.

In October 2020, Idena announced a challenge supported by the Gitcoin team to integrate Gitcoin with Idena, and the integration has been implemented.

Now Gitcoin users can connect their Idena accounts to gain a 25% trust bonus in Gitcoin quadratic voting.

Currently*, there are 50 Gitcoin accounts with connected Idena addresses.

Idena community

Community growth and management

Community is in the very DNA of Idena. Community drives the growth of the network. Community mechanics like invitations and flips are deeply integrated with the protocol mechanics.

We believe that it is the community that in due time will develop and manage the Idena ecosystem based on DAO governance principles.

So, we are glad to witness the Idena community grow and become stronger and more active.

Since the last report, the community has grown more than 10 times:

10 platforms;
28 groups;
21 languages;
26K total community members on all platforms.

Number of Idena community members on different platforms

We encourage the Idena community to contribute to the Idena ecosystem in many possible ways:

supporting development projects and taking part in hackathons;
creating and growing local communities, doing translations, and creating content in different languages;
promoting and popularizing Idena.

A true community is much bigger than numbers because behind the numbers there are real people who share the same ideals and values.

We want to thank all active community members who contribute to the project in different ways or have contributed in the past: @realRioda, @PrivacyGeorge, @geatb, @Syd, @Bingbinglee, @PaleBlueDot, @RealMahmoud, @Setanimals, @Hannes, @EgyptianPharaoh, @NikTom, @ShadowCrypto, @Rados, @Anthrogic, @Lemoe, @reb0rn21, @Schweinz, @epiks, @ToniDev, @LeoCornelius, @Yappuh, @Audiodidakt314, @realMickeyK and all the other moderators, supporters, and active participants.

Development projects

We envision Idena as the ecosystem that grows through the contribution of the community of developers who share the values of decentralization, democracy, and human rights and want to build products that substantiate these values. That is why we are delighted to see a variety of community-driven development projects being released, to list a few:

Idena.today advanced analytics site by Endogen, Shadow, and their team;
My Idena mobile app by @redDwarf03;
Idena Pocket web wallet for Idena with Ledger support by @idelse;
Idena to Binance Smart Chain bridge by @RealMahmoud.

Other resources and apps created by the Idena community are listed in the Appendix, the Community Resources section of the official website, and on the Idena Apps community website.

Hackathons

In 2020, 5 hackathons were launched:

Integrate TimeLock or Multisig smart contracts

Result: MultiSig and TimeLock contracts implemented in My Idena mobile app by @redDwarf03.

Build an oracle-driven dApp using RefundableOracleLock smart contract

Result: not submitted.

Build Idena Ethereum Relay

Result: Ethereum Relay developed by @henryfour

Use Sign-In with Idena function on a website

Result:

Idena Discord auth bot by @iyomisc
Idenary game and art project
Idena.vote customized polls website by @RealMahmoud (no longer supported)
IdenaPoll polling website by @paolofacchinetti (no longer supported)
Fairdrop.io fair airdrop service
Integrate Gitcoin With Idena

Result: Integration developed by @iRohin

App translation

The Idena app is now available in 21 languages.

All the app translations have been done by community members. If your language is not on the list yet, you can add a translation by submitting it to the Idena Github repository.

Bug bounty

Launched in March 2020, the Idena Bug Bounty program rewards software security researchers who hunt down Idena’s vulnerabilities. If you believe that you have found a security vulnerability in the Idena node or Idena app, we encourage you to add it to the issue tracker of the corresponding repository in Idena Github and notify us at info@idena.io.

Open source marketing

Any Idena community member has an opportunity to contribute to Idena’s promotion by taking the initiative to implement a marketing activity. Through the last year, Idena was promoted by our valued community members on several public events, in dozens of articles, reviews, blog posts, video reviews, and guides:

Public speaking

Digital Identity: A Look Ahead discussion on RadicalxChange with Supriyo Roy and Paula Berman hosted by Kaliya Young;
DeID Summit: Decentralization, identity, and democracy discussion with George Kobakhidze and Adli Takkal Bataille hosted by Humpty Calderon

Articles, reviews, and blog posts

Who Watches the Watchmen? A Review of Subjective Approaches for Sybil-Resistance in Proof of Personhood Protocols by Divya Siddarth, Sergey Ivliev, Santiago Siri, Paula Berman
An Internet for Humans: Proof-of-Personhood Explained by Paula Berman and Divya Siddarth
Idena Trust Experiment by Pale Blue Dot
Living from Idena rewards by Davey
Idena.Site guides, FAQs, and documentation by Rioda

Video reviews, guides, and CGI

Since the last report, more than 100 videos about Idena were uploaded to YouTube, their overall view count exceeds 240K. 72 Idena videos appeared on TikTok, and the view count of the videos with the #idenacrypto hashtag is more than 100K.

Installing Idena on a Windows PC and other guides by Rioda
Idena promo video by EDM
53rd Idena Validation Ceremony by bfresh

You can find the long list of user-generated content in the Appendix.

We are open to widening the range of activities and considering other types of community involvement.

Roadmap

Goals for 2021

Sharding phase I

Validation sharding (sharding phase I) will increase the stability and throughput of the network and adapt it to the peak load that validation imposes. It will also build the basement for deploying transaction sharding (sharding phase II), which is planned as a stretched goal.

At present, validation sharding is in active testing. All the key functions are implemented. We plan to release validation sharding as soon as we finish testing, presumably with one of the upcoming forks.

Better onboarding in the Idena Web App

We see the Idena Web App as a fast lane for new users who want to experience Idena without the burden of deploying a full node on a local machine. Also, Web App offers an easy way to attend the validation on the go when using the Desktop App is not possible. Alternatively, Web App can serve as a thin client for those who run the node on VPS or mine in the family pool.

Our focus in Web App development will stay on the features that improve the UX and ensure network decentralization, stability, and scalability:

Adaptive layout of the web app for seamless mobile experience;
Web App localization;
Test validation with public results and scoring;
Shared node marketplace: onboarding for new node providers, account management for node providers, market mechanics for fair price discovery of node renting fees;
Decentralized access to shared nodes for candidates;
Guided onboarding experience in the web app;
Streamlined invitation mechanics for easier onboarding in the web app.

Idena Onchain Advertising Network

Onchain advertising allows creating an ecosystem with attention economics where the market value of the Idena coin is driven by the fundamental demand for its utility.

Advertisers will have to purchase iDNA and burn the coins to compete for the attention in the network, reducing coin supply, creating natural demand for iDNA, and, consequently, supporting sustainable economics.

Idena Onchain Advertising Network is one of our main priorities. Currently, it is in active development. All protocol-side components of the ad network are already implemented:

IPFS storage for advertisement content linked to user profile;
Advertisement verification by oracles;
Self-targeting: language targeting will be available after launch; other targeting options will be added later;
Price auction for ad selection and price discovery;
Coin burn mechanics.

We are now working on the UI functions for ads in the Desktop App and aim to soft-launch the Ad Network in Q3 2021 as planned.

Adding flip score for better AI resistance

AI resistance of flips is the cornerstone of the Idena security system. To ensure the quality of flips in a decentralized manner, we want to stimulate network participants to make AI-resistant flips by introducing the flip scoring system. The score measures how difficult the flip is for AI. The reward for creating a complex flip increases with its score. Some possible ways to increase the score are:

collages;
hand drawing in flips;
adversarial noise and transformations;
complex word combinations for creating unconventional flip stories.

Fully-featured smart contracts

The basic smart contracts in Idena allowed employing the fundamental governance mechanisms in the network. To make the next step towards building a fully functional dApp ecosystem, we plan to add fully-featured smart contracts by the end of 2021.

We envision Idena smart contracts to be highly available and easily adaptable to different systems and development stacks.

That is why we will design Idena smart contracts with the following requirements in mind:

Turing-full virtual machine;
Cross-compilation from the most popular languages for smart contract development;
Native integration with Idena Sybil-resistant oracles for feeding external data into the smart contract.

The execution of Idena smart contracts will inevitably incur running fees, like in any other blockchain. But it shouldn’t create any adoption barriers or inequality because all users are entitled to equal rewards for mining, which they can use to pay the fee for running smart contracts.

Stretched goals

Sharding phase II

After validation sharding (phase I), the next step will be transaction sharding (phase II) that we consider an important milestone in our stretched goals.

Transaction sharding in Idena will significantly increase the throughput of the network without compromising security or decentralization — the blockchain trilemma that many projects are striving to solve.

In PoW or PoS blockchains, dissecting the network into shards will proportionally decrease network safety: the smaller the shard is, the fewer resources are necessary for a successful 51% attack. Moreover, any consensus mechanism susceptible to Sybil attack allows concentrating the mining power, making the attack even easier.

In a network with Proof-of-Person consensus with anonymous nodes and equal voting power 51% attack on the shard becomes highly inefficient if not impossible because of the following reasons:

identities are randomly assigned to different shards which prevents collusion;
resources like big stakes or high mining power can not be leveraged to get more voting power because of Sybil resistance;
the nodes are anonymous, so the node owners can not be affected in the real world.

DAOs and decentralized governance

Idena is built on decentralization and democracy. These values are an integral part of the protocol itself and the community around the project. To stay true to these principles,

we envision Idena becoming a community-driven ecosystem governed according to DAO principles.

At the present state of network development, we stimulate community input by funding hackathons, development projects, bug bounties, and community marketing activities. As the core team, we see our role in developing the Idena protocol — the basis and the platform for decentralized applications inside the Idena ecosystem — and integrations bridging the gap with other networks.

In the long run, we want the Idena ecosystem to become fully sustainable and self-governed, with proactive and responsible community initiating, funding, and implementing impactful projects, building on top of the protocol, and developing the protocol itself.

These are the milestones we need to pass to reach this state, as we see it:

Idena Kickstarter: a crowdfunding platform, where the projects are driven by oracles and funded using basic smart contracts;
Full-fledged smart contracts for building complex dApps in the Idena ecosystem;
Serverless messenger and decentralized publishing platform to grant freedom of speech and uncensored communication essential for effective governance;
Zero wallet governance: Idena improvement proposal (IDIP) platform funded from the Zero wallet and governed by the Idena community.

Even though we have our vision of how a truly democratic community can function, ideal democratic governance is terra incognita for us and for all the society in general because never before did we have a technology that allowed creating a fully democratic, decentralized, and anonymous community. Idena gives us a chance to explore it.

Thank you for reading!

We hope that the report was comprehensive. In the Appendix below you can find many more links to community development initiatives and content created by our community members.