DCloud Infrastructure

Automatic sharding + shard management by Management layer.

Management layer: registration of the user (account), registration of shards, registration of private shards, registration of nodes, appointment of examning nodes (validators), nodes punishment. In the Management layer, transactions are checked by all nodes of the system, therefore, this is an expensive interaction.
Shards layer: all classic transactions that exist in regular classic blockchains

Now there are no well-established parameters by which shardings are compared, each project has its own characteristics.
However, our CTO, Igor Belousov, proposed his classification for distributed systems with sharding. Below is a table comparing known platforms.
Note: not all information was published by some of mentioned projects.


If there is a main chain in the system, this means that the speed of validation of any transaction is equal to the rate of validation in the main chain - 2-3 minutes in general. There is an opinion that when there is a main chain, these are actually different blockchains combined in one platform, and not a single blockchain network.
State refers to all system parameters at the moment (all accounts, the amount of funds for them, smart contracts and their status). If the state is full (for example, in the Zilliqa project), all nodes must store all the information that is energy consuming. Easier validation here is the main advantage. Sharding state - each shard works completely separately, validation takes considerable time. We have a mixed state type. Part of the data (state of shards, accounts belonging to shards, state accounts, private shards, whick nodes are validators) is stored on all nodes. And the data that is processed is stored inside the shard.
Cross-shard transactions (between shards) - in most projects go through the main chain, but in our system - directly.

The most important difference is there is no leader in the shard, a block is created collectively by all nodes. In the other consensuses, the block is usually created by the leader node and then confirmed by the others.
Thus, we reduce the number of coordination steps and, most importantly, completely remove the possibility of censorship, the seizure of control over the shards management is possible only if more than half of the nodes have colluded.
Since all nodes can submit their information, we are going to use mandatory actions to create additional sources of entropy to create a randomizer as close as possible to reality. We enter into each block such data from each node that cannot be predicted, because these data are signed with their private keys, and it is problematic to hack them. On each block new data is entered signed by keys.

Reduced the number of matching steps to 3.
The maximum number of nodes in a shard is no more than 150. BFT protocols work as quickly as possible on a small number of nodes.

Technological decentralization is achieved through the BFT-like protocol Resonance
Economic (socio-economic) decentralization is executed through the PoS (proof-of-stake) algorithm. It is beneficial for the owner to protect his node from seizure and not economically profitable to compromise the system.

Unlike mining, minting does not require calculation, the node receives a reward for the very fact of block creation.

Validators are changed every 1 hour (every 3600 blocks).

When a block comes from someone else`s shard, the present validator knows which a validator is responsible for it (we described above what is included in the full state). If more than 50% of validators have signed a block, then the validator decides to do so.

Shard status data is stored in two other shards. The last 2-3 blocks may disappear, all previous will be restored.

To capture the platform management system - Management Layer, it is necessary to capture more than 50% of all nodes in all shards. This condition is similar to those working in systems with PoW. Capturing a separate shard will also lead to nothing - since all transactions of the shard are checked by external validators. And in order to confidently capture the majority of validators, it is necessary to get the majority of all nodes. Which leads us to the same indicators of security.

Protection against Sybil attack is PoS (proof-of-stake) mechanism. In order for a node to be connected to the system, its owner must send 500,000 SK tokens to a specific system address.

All components of The Power platform are written completely from scratch by the project developers, the key features of the project are patented, that protects the project its partners and customers from potential external influences, vulnerabilities or control attempts.