Designing and deploying a distributed ledger is a technically challenging task. What is expected of a ledger is the promise of a consistent view to all participants as well as a guarantee of responsiveness to the continuous flow of events that result from their actions. These two properties, sometimes referred to as persistence and liveness, are the hallmark of distributed…

Scalability is the greatest challenge to blockchain adoption. By applying a principled, evidence-based approach, we have arrived at a solution for Cardano and networks similar to it: Hydra. Hydra is the culmination of extensive research, and a decisive step in enabling decentralized networks to securely scale to global requirements.

What is scalability and how do we measure it?

Scaling a distributed ledger system refers to the capability of providing high transaction throughput, low latency, and minimal storage per node. These properties have been repeatedly touted as critical for the successful deployment of blockchain protocols as part of real-world systems. In terms of throughput, the VISA network reportedly handles an average of 1,736 payment transactions per second (TPS) with the capability of handling up to 24,000 TPS and is frequently used as a baseline comparison. Transaction…

In a proof of stake (PoS) blockchain protocol, the ledger is maintained by the stakeholders that hold assets in that ledger. This allows PoS blockchains to use less energy compared with proof of work (PoW) or other types of blockchain protocols. Nevertheless, this requirement imposes a burden on stakeholders. It requires a good number of them to be online and maintain…

TL;DR In response to recent discussions in social media, we give a brief comparison of the Ouroboros and Casper proof-of-stake protocols.

Ouroboros is a formally specified and analysed protocol with mathematically proven security guarantees based on clearly specified assumptions. The protocol description, models and proofs are all public. Hence, the underlying assumptions, the…

A blog post on the Steemit website appeared recently making a number of claims regarding Ouroboros. The article contains several factual inaccuracies. For instance, it is claimed that “DPOS” in the Ouroboros paper stands for “delegated proof of stake”, while in fact, DPOS means “dynamic proof of stake”, or that the protocol requires a "2/3+" ratio of parties being honest, while…