TL;DR
The consensus mechanism is the most important issue in the blockchain system, which determines the security and performance of the public chain. Trias adopts TEE, trusted computing and other technologies to screen out safe and efficient consensus nodes quickly. While accelerating consensus, it also avoids the factors of human intervention to ensure the stable operation of the entire network. This article explains how nodes in Trias network work.
1. Become a Trusted node
When a node attempts to join the Trias network, its operating environment must meet certain standards, which is the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). TEE is used to evaluate the nodes first, and the security of Trias nodes is preliminarily guaranteed. Then only proved nodes join the Trias network to participate in a game of “God rolls the dice” automatically.
“God rolls the dice” means that nodes randomly select other nodes in the network to launch a “challenge” to prove their credibility through continuous random verification, and the “challenger” will synchronize the “challenge result”, i.e. verification information, to other nodes.
The advantage of this randomness is that if a node wants to “lie”, he must either corrupt the next “challenger” or become “challenger” himself, and since there is no way to know who the next “challenger” will be, the cost of “lying” becomes very high. In this way, Trias networks prevent collusion between nodes.
In this process, each node stores the verification information between nodes, which is called Kernel. It is updated with verified information and represents the trusted status of nodes in the network. Each element in Kernel contains three parts: 1) verification record, 2) credit record and 3) node status:
1) Verification record: represents the verification result of one node to another node in a recent period. If it is confirmed that the node is somehow problematic, the value will be increased and the increased result will be stored in the credit record.
2) Credit record: if certain verification is successful and the node status is correct, the credit record will remain unchanged. The larger the value of the credit record is, the worse the trusted state of the verified node is.
3) Node status: Indicates whether the node is online or offline.
2. Synchronize the trusted status of nodes
Node state of trustworthiness will be spread via the Gossip protocol, which is used for the synchronization of node states in a distributed system. Similar to the way how rumors spread among human beings, nodes collect and interact with other adjacent nodes of trusted status information, and spread out the states.
The Gossip protocol has high fault tolerance. In the transmission process, the protocol does not require the information of each node to be consistent. However, as time goes by, the entire network will get identical information at a certain point.
The transferable trust relationship is established through the Gossip protocol, so that each consensus node forms a reputation network, endorsing and proving each other, and thus iterates repeatedly to gradually locate the node with the best trust status in the whole network.
3. Select the consensus node
At random intervals, the Trias network ranks all nodes accordingly, creating a “Ladder”. In Ladder, the higher the ranking, the better the trustworthiness status, and the higher the cost of lying.
Each node will send the status data and ranking data of other nodes calculated by itself through TEE to the chain through RPC (Remote Procedure Call). RPC is a way to call services remotely. Callers only need to get the results of function operation without realizing the specific process of function, which can improve the performance of network operation. After a consensus is reached and blocks are generated, the rankings of all nodes based on trusted values are consistent.
The whole process is based on trusted computing and P2P networks, without human intervention, ensuring the objectivity and fairness of a “Ladder”.Trias network selects a group of “hardest to lie” nodes to be the consensus nodes for the next period of time.
Official website: https://www.trias.one
Whitepaper: https://www.trias.one/whitepaper
Telegram: https://t.me/triaslab
Twitter: https://twitter.com/triaslab
Discord: https://discord.gg/uSHpezwKWZ
Trade on Pancake: https://triaslab.medium.com/how-to-buy-trias-on-pancakeswap-d9bd1628e69f
