Smartlands Network Architecture Explained: the Validators

Smartlands Network will use delegated Proof-Of-Stake consensus protocol. Proof-of-work protocol was a great idea as a technology demonstrator, but it limits the capacity of a network, uses too much electricity that both generates an enormous amount of costs and have a negative environmental impact. Federated byzantine algorithm is a great concept but does not provide sufficient motivation to run a node/validator that may result in low network resilience, as a limited number of nodes would be available in the network.

Delegated POS provides the highly efficient way to keep the network resilient and provide robust performance in terms of ledger close time, overall transaction performance, and amount of information recorded to the blockchain (as Smartlands Network will be used to save hashes of data that must be kept immutable).

We do understand the complexity of creating our own blockchain and that was the reason why we have started our platform on the available solution instead of creating a new one. Therefore, we have carefully considered available solutions to make this task manageable and predictable, requiring a limited amount of resources and time. Cosmos infrastructure in our opinion provides both required flexibility and reliability. We will not have to create a consensus mechanism, block creation and storage, while we will create transaction handling and world state mechanism that will suit developed business logic. Furthermore, Сosmos network provides for atomic swap of assets between blockchains built on their protocol.

Validators

Smartlands will use Cosmos SDK `staking`, one of the core components of the Cosmos framework and well-developed module that enables Cosmos-based blockchain to support an advanced, highly customisable Delegated Proof-of-Stake system.

Every user of the Network is allowed to become a Validator of the Network, participating in maintaining consensus (producing and validating blocks) and network governance. The users who don’t run validators are incentivised to delegating their tokens (voting power) to reputable network validators. Thus users of the network ultimately determine the set of validators who will ensure the security of the network.

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Smartlands Network is a development of Smartlands Platform Foundation (SPF). SPF is a non-profit organization that supports the development and growth of the Smartlands Network.