Curie Technology Preview #3: Bluzelle DB’s COSMOS-powered Proof-of-Stake Consensus
A multi-node swarm showing how super-majorities are critical for our Proof-of-Stake consensus to work
Proof-of-Stake System applications
Continuing our series of Curie Product Previews, today we follow the first and second installments with #3 — an extensive demo on Byzantine Fault Tolerant Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus that Bluzelle uses. We use the same PoS solution as Cosmos, Tendermint. Cosmos introduces modules, that provide much needed functionality for an actual decentralized service. For example, accounting, management of a cryptocurrency, and the concept of validator sets, are some of the things that Cosmos adds.
Furthermore, and importantly, it is simpler to add your own modules and handles to Cosmos, to implement the logic that is core to your service. In Bluzelle’s case, we implemented a database (Bluzelle DB). The Bluzelle Network utilises the security features provided to form up the logic for our product, making it trustless yet secure.
Cosmos-powered features
We demonstrate the current version of the Bluzelle DB in the context of how consensus works in different scenarios. Here is a brief outline:
- Running a multi-node swarm and showing who the validators are. We explain what a super-majority is (66% of votes), and how having a super-majority of agreement is critical to operations.
- Running a transaction on the swarm and showing success. This ensures the operability of the consensus network.
- Intentionally turning off one of the validators. Showing how we have lost the super-majority and how the network is considered unsafe, and stalls (instead of unsafely continuing to process requests).
- Trying to run a transaction when the network is stalled. This also strengthens the Network further by ensuring that rules can be set by regular clients to ensure bad operations do not continue and get away with, and there will only be operations happening only upon validators’ approval.
- Bringing back the the turned-off validator and recovery. Showing the network recover AND that the transactions attempted while it was down, were not lost, and now “play back”.
Achieving Decentralization
With the Consensus Database set up, it demonstrates the possibility of security features that will further strengthen the integrity of the operations within the Bluzelle Network, where unpleasant behaviours can be stopped and removed. This is a further add-on from the previous video, Multi-Farmer Trusted Database demonstration, that showed validators working out CRUD functions together. With validators being able to communicate the entire flow of operations together, and now also being able to set rules to ensure the bad behaviours are prevented from happening, we have yet taken another step towards achieving decentralization.
Following with our Curie Update, next month we will be demonstrating the staking mechanism through our PoS capabilities, where BNT Stake amounts will be equivalent to their voting power in a swarm. This will allow a dynamic membership to be formed and a ranking to be tabulated, based on the amount and quality of contributions they have to the Bluzelle Network.
About Bluzelle
Bluzelle is a decentralized data storage network for dapps. Bluzelle is secure, tamper-proof, and highly scalable. It is powered by a byzantine fault tolerant cluster of blockchains that are customized specifically for database operations.
