Pandora Boxchain: Monthly Digest, September

Starting this month and going forward we plan to publish a monthly digest with the most interesting updates for the Pandora Boxchain project.

Research and Development:

The main focus of our research and development activities in September was on Prometheus consensus and a layer 1 network based on it, which will become the hosting layer for our high-load computing protocol at the level 2. We call this 1st layer of network “BOX”, and the second “PAN”; together they ensemble Pandora Boxchain.

Overall directions of research of Prometheus consensus and BOX network development were related to:

• Formal verification of the parts of the consensus algorithm utilising special insertion modelling methodology, developed by Prof. Litichevsky and Prof. Hilbert;
• designing the improvements to the consensus algorithms;
• development of consensus prototypes in Python;
• improvements to the existing Rust implementation of the network node.

The results of these activities were the following:

1. Implemented prototype of Prometheus consensus in Python. We’ve started working on verification mechanisms which will protect the network from accepting faulty or malicious blocks and transactions. This includes wrongly signed, sent repeatedly, sent at a wrong time, in a wrong round, with wrong links to previous blocks or transactions.
2. Started working on formal verification of gossips mechanism for Prometheus consensus. This mechanism allows validators to communicate and reach consensus on when a block was skipped either maliciously or by network problems. If one of the validators doesn’t see a block from the previous validator in a validation queue he sends negative gossip and other validators respond either with a block if they know about it or with negative gossip confirming block absence in DAG.
3. Implemented so named “timestepper mechanism” that allows to perform tricky tests by manipulating simulation of time and seeing how nodes react to complex scenarios.
4. Switched to Elliptic Curve cryptography in Prometheus consensus. It is much more space efficient than RSA and allows us to calculate close to real-world memory and performance overhead.
5. Performed analysis of Dfinity, Casper, Tezos consensuses and made an investigations on BLS, Schnorr signatures.
6. Created a new ordering and merging algorithms for Prometheus consensus.
7. Worked with the gossip system: initialization of sending negative and positive state events, gossip transaction, checking of a full system of gossip systems work.
8. Made mempool updates: improvements of the mempool functionality for working with gossip transactions, adding new transactions to the block, implementation of the penalty case, which arises if, within the framework of mempool, a negative and positive state from one author was discovered. In this case, the validator will immediately write out the penalty (even write out to himself) and immediately transit into the block.
9. Created and tested tx_by_hash() storing — storage system for all transactions within the {tx_hash: tx} structure or {transaction hash: transaction}. This mechanism is based on DAG and includes methods for adding and searching transactions in this structure.

Additionally to R&D activities in Prometheus and BOX Network we were also performing further development of our Proof of Computing Work protocol and existing PAN testnet:

1. Developed a prototype of the electron.js application with built-in box proxy. Based on this prototype we will develop The Pandora Market desktop application with a description of the use cases.
2. Studied Proof of Computing Work algorithm from the point of view of Markov chains. There are three types of nodes in Proof of Cognitive Work: worker (performs computations), validator (validates computations), arbiter (resolves conflicts through arbitration). Through the accumulation of reputation or by not following the protocol (i.e. Byzantine behaviour) the nodes in Pandora network migrate between these states. This makes Markov chain an interesting framework to study behaviour in Pandora’s ecosystem. The questions of this study are: what are the steady states in this ecosystem given different parameters of the model, and under which conditions ecosystem exits in a steady state, such that it functions as designed.

Events:

September, 5th ➡️ Pandora Boxchain Meetup in Berlin

On our second Pandora Boxchain meetup in Berlinblockchain and AI enthusiasts joined together after the Zero Knowledge Summit at Mindspace. Andrey Sobol presented our research on ‘Randomness in PoS’. After Sergey Korostelyov shed some light on how decentralised distributed network technology can help build decentralized AI systems. His presentation is available here.

September, 7th — 9th➡️#ETHBerlin Hackathon

Our team created a reference implementation of the ERC1329- Inalienable Reputation Token during #ETHBerlin Hackathon. This ERC proposes the standard in creating inalienable reputation tokens. Take a look at first version of ERC1329 and join the discussion on #Ethereum GitHub.

September, 9th ➡️ Blockchain Startup Pitch

We took part in Blockchain Startup Pitch that took place during Berlin Blockchain Week. The team presented the project to blockchain savvy audience and had a great discussion with the community.

September, 7th-11th ➡️ Blоckchain Cruise

Maxim Orlovsky, the founder of Pandora Boxchain, took part in Blockchain Cruise on The Mediterranean sea together with Charlie Lee, Bobby Lee, Jimmy Song, Brock Pierce, Tone Vays and other influential changemakers in the blockchain space. He presented the results of joint academic research and technical engineering, revealing a new type of PoS consensus Prometheus, that supersedes PoW in all main aspects. His presentation: “PoS Consensus: can it be as much censorship-resistant and secure as PoW?” is available for all on slideshare.net.

September 22–23 ➡️Baltics Honeybadger Conference 2018

At the end of the month our Team attended the Baltic Honeybadger 2018 Conference, where we had a lot of discussions regarding Pandora Boxchain technologies with Bitcoin community & developers, including Adam Back, Peter Todd, Giacomo Zucco, Matt Corallo, Eric Voskuil, Alex Petrov and others.

We post updates on Research and Development achievements and upcoming Events on socials. Our Communities in Social Networks are really strong and active, and they enlarged greatly during September. In only one month we gained over 5000 users in Facebook and more than 1200 followers followed as on Twitter. Join our communities and be a part of Pandora Boxchain.