TOP Network: Decentralized Communication — Part 3: TOP Network Architecture II
For the first part of this article and the history of the fourth revolution, please look here. For the second part, please have a look here.
Two weeks ago I started writing about the architecture of the TOP Network project and will continue doing so today. I like to keep articles a bit on the shorter side, so you can read them in between activities. Life’s been busy, and as usual, TOP sure has been as well. Testnet 2.0 is ongoing, optimizing smart contracts are to be tested end of this month in version 3.0 and pre-research on version 4.0 is done as we speak. TOP is on track to launch her mainnet scheduled for this quarter.
Would have to double check the facts, but pretty sure it has the most ROI listing this year. So far the people that got in the earliest, saw a 27x return(!) and naturally, anything that goes up that fast comes down again as well. Price needs a history and consolidation to form a market structure. Yesterday it was up 40% again(only in crypto), with the most volume on Huobi (more than BTC and ETH). So yeah… still tremendous interest in the price speculation department. With the Direct Premium Offering of TOP on Huobi, the targeted 15 million dollars were raised and TOP Network has the funds to do what needs to be done — create a decentralized telecommunication network that will free us from user data breaches by centralized parties.
Last article I wrote about the consensus mechanism of the main chain, the architecture of the Multi-Chain Platform and how it will handle the sheer volume of transactions needed for a telecommunication network on the blockchain, comparable to a permission network (and arguably even better).
Let’s continue down the rabbit hole of this technological Wonderland.
The consensus network of TOP Network consists of three layers. These layers consist of different kinds of nodes. In the TOP three-layered system, these three layers are:
- The Edge Network, providing the access point for clients. This layer has Edge Nodes
- The Routing Network, synchronizing transactions and states across zones and shards. This layer has Advanced Nodes.
- The Core Network, executing the actual consensus process for transactions. This layer has Core Nodes
For those who don’t quite get what a node is, or does, I will break it down a bit.
A node is a physical device, such as a computer(as small as a smartphone or larger, such as a desktop) or a server that can receive, forward and send data in the network. These nodes have routing functions, all together they participate in the network by discovering and connecting to other nodes. Once connected, the validate and broadcast transactions and blocks. Imagine beacons lit in ancient times across walls to alert and warn about incoming enemies. Blockchain nodes work even better than beacons because they broadcast to each other all the time.
Nodes can have different functions. Some just confirm transactions and blocks, while others keep the entire history of all transactions and the parental line to the genesis block (first block in a blockchain).
The beacon analogy was purposely done because a lot in consensus networks has to do with defense. The Edge network is TOP’s first line of defense — it is the only layer apps and users (clients) come in contact with. The sole purpose of the Edge Nodes is to relay messages and transactions to the other two layers of the consensus network. Edge nodes do not participate in the transaction consensus, nor keep a transaction history or generate any transaction.
The Routing Network is the second line of defense and this layer relays transactions as well to the Core Network. This layer does not generate transactions and does not take part in the consensus, just like the Edge Network. The Routing Network adds an extra layer of security by auditing transactions confirmed by the Core Network. The Advanced Nodes manage shard and synchronize their states as well.
The Core Network. Divided into different zones and shards — it’s here where the magic happens. This is where the consensus is executed by the shards in the different zones in which the entire network is mapped out. Shards validate en execute consensus all at the same time at lightning speed in a two-layer sharding network that is capable of handling the volume of transactions needed for real-world businesses. As these transactions are of the utmost importance, no interference from the outside is possible. This is done to ensure the trust needed. Otherwise, with lightning fast consensus, malicious intent may be discovered too late. Good thing it’s out of the question, by design. The nodes on this network are called the Core Nodes. This is where the dPOS comes into play. The Core Nodes (divided into zones and shard) are elected by their stake on TOP. After this election, they participate as Consensus Nodes, selected by a Verifiable Random Function (Silvio Micali from Algorand says hello) and form the consensus overlay of each of the network shards. The Consensus Nodes in as shard then perform PBFT algorithms on all transactions in the corresponding shards. For security reasons, shards should maintain 21 consensus nodes and 9 back-up nodes in case anything might happen in the election process.
The consensus mechanism in TOP is pBFT-dPOS as briefly described above, in full, it says Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance -delegated Proof of Stake. To start with the first part, Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance is a consensus mechanism, already used a lot in real-world businesses, such as Aviation. The system is designed that if something goes wrong, it won’t lead to a disaster. However, if a system is only built on PBFT, it might be (very) vulnerable to malevolent actors. The system is as trustworthy as the nodes in the system are. If a PBFT system has only a few nodes, let’s say 7, taking over 3 might be enough to seriously hamper the system(Sybil attack). The benefits of this system are that it can make decisions very fast.
The answer to this can be mixing with another consensus mechanism, like the energy-consuming, and super-secure PoW — provided it has the dominant hashrate on an algorithm, like SHA-256 (otherwise miners could switch and take over) or choosing another solution that isn’t reliant on a third party for validation.
Such a validator can be one who has ‘Skin in the game’, like a stakeholder in a traditional company. Stakeholders can vote for or against the direction of a company. Just like in voting in traditional companies, having the largest stake leads to the biggest say and can be used for personal gains, rather than the integrity of the companies future. That consensus mechanism in a blockchain is called Proof of Stake.
The critique against the traditional dPOS is that simple mass accumulation of tokens by a node may lead to getting the biggest stake and the node effectively being elected as a consensus node, thus claiming the reward and establishing a rich-getting-richer scheme. This is far from ideal in an ecosystem that has to validate transactions. It really means you just need the biggest stake and time, before everything is decided by you as the centralized party. You might even double-spend.
TOP has taken multiple measures to counter this, next to the asset stake for the traditional dPOS, reputation and computational power are factors in having a Comprehensive Stake. Verifiable Random Functions elects the deciding nodes among the nodes that are staked with the highest Comprehensive Stake. Only after this, the nodes execute the pBFT algorithm to validate transactions and produce blocks. Keep in mind this happens all in fractions of a second.
Becoming a Comprehensive Stake in TOP isn’t as easy as just accumulating TOP. A node needs the assets and will lock these for a certain amount of time. A node will mine TOP tokens and the amount of these mined tokens will correlate to the reputation of a node. If the node has malicious intent, it will harm the reputation of the node and lowering the chance of being elected. The node needs able to provide a certain amount of bandwidth and this is tested through Proof-of-Bandwidth consensus. The node also needs to be able to do the basic required computational power to participate in the consensus. The PoW consensus to participate is based on Script and is anti-ASIC mining.
(This is important, because ASIC mining may eventually lead to centralization, just like the traditional dPOS. ASIC miners are specialized computers that are faster in executing PoW-algorithms because they solely focus on this task. So the more ASIC miners you possess, the bigger your advantage is, if that coin isn’t ASIC resistant.)
If all the above requirements are met, a node may first join a candidate pool, before eventually elected as a consensus node. Within each shard, consensus node performs PBFT on transactions. A transaction is confirmed after it received 2/3 of the signatures of the consensus nodes in a shard and gets approval from an advanced node on the Routing network., which audits the transactions on the network.
In most blockchains we have seen so far, there’s a chain of parental blocks all the way to the genesis block, with the longest chain accepted and stored for future reference. As mentioned before, this might take minutes to an hour or so. This is mostly done for safety reasons. TOP Network is doing it differently and does not have the linear trace back to the beginning. It’s a bit more intertwined as it uses a lattice architecture. When I visualize it in a grotesque oversimplification, it is a chain versus a braid. TOP uses these lattices to perform transaction synchronization across shards in a zone. Each shard broadcasts blocks to the other shards in the same zone about updated account information and relevant data, keeping all shards synchronized in terms of account state.
It’s through these ingenious systems that make TOP Network secure, fast as lighting and distributed. TOP Network has been designed from the ground up to process thousands of transactions, because this is simply demanded from a telecommunications network, such as the network TOP aspires to become.
By now it should become clear why I am so much interested in this project. I truly feel it can help mankind if we decentralize telecommunication and put this in the hands of us, the people.
Telecommunication is a fundamental right in my opinion, for the Modern Man, we need to stay connected to each other and have the opportunity to call out injustice when needed, or simply to socialize, considering we are still mammals. We should be free to express our thoughts — without having our privacy compromised.
In the upcoming articles, I will write about how these specific services work and how we, the users, will be part of it.
I will dive into the partnerships as well and what these technological collaborations may entail.
You can find TOP Network on:
Email Contact: contact@topnetwork.org
Official Website: http://www.topnetwork.org
Telegram: https://t.me/topnetwork_top & for Dutch https://t.me/topnetwork_topNEDERLAND
Twitter: https://twitter.com/topnetwork_top
Medium: https://medium.com/@topnetwork
Steemit: https://steemit.com/@topnetwork-top
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/topnetwork_top
About TOP Network
TOP Network is a decentralized open communication network that provides cloud communication services on the blockchain. TOP offers secure, low-cost services such as messaging, calling, video, VPN, CDN, IoT data sharing and more.
TOP Network is also a high-performance public blockchain platform designed to handle real-world business of any size or volume. Powered by innovations including three-layer network, two-layer sharding, two-layer lattice DAG and PBFT-DPoS*, TOP can process several hundred thousand transactions per second on the blockchain.
The long-term mission of TOP Network is to build a public blockchain infrastructure for all Dapps. Our world-class team of over 100 developers is striving for this goal.
TOP Network originated from the common underlying network layer of Dingtone, CoverMe and SkyVPN, three communication apps built by the TOP team before the blockchain project. These apps, having attracted over 60 million users in total, will be ported to TOP Network upon the launch of TOP and generate huge volumes of transactions in the TOP ecosystem.
TOP Network was founded by serial entrepreneur Steve Wei and his colleagues in late 2017. Steve was one of the earliest employees of WebEx in the 1990s. After WebEx, he founded a successful video conferencing software company which was acquired by Huawei in 2010. In 2012, Steve co-founded Dingtone, a public listed company operating popular communication apps such as Dingtone, CoverMe and SkyVPN.
On March 26th, TOP Network made its debut as the first project launched through Huobi Prime — Huobi’s selective Direct Premium Offering platform. A total of 1.5 billion TOP Tokens were sold out in seconds, after which the price of TOP surged 2770% once it was freely tradable. Upon the listing, TOP’s trading volume hit $100 million in just eight seconds, and surpassed the trading volume of Bitcoin at $167 million in less than a week, ranking first in terms of volume on Huobi Global. Before that, TOP Network has closed $15 million early investments from prestigious institutional investors and individual billionaire investors, including DHVC, Fenbushi Capital, NEO Global Capital (NGC), Ontology Global Capital (OGC), LD Capital and more.
