Aphelion – Master of all trades
The most well-known issues with blockchains today are: speed, cost, security, decentralization, efficiency, scalability, complexity and the lack of interoperability. It has always been important to solve all of these issues, but it has always seemed that improvement in one field causes drawbacks somewhere else.
Libonomy’s consensus engine Aphelion is a new solution that has an answer to this problem. Aphelion is a decentralized Artificial Intelligence consensus mechanism that has capability to make independent decisions about the functions and security of the network.
In Aphelion engine all the nodes that join the network are divided into special pools. Part of the nodes are involved in the main work, powering the whole network. After Aphelion examines the node’s possibilities, it gets assigned tasks that it will be capable of completing in a short, set amount of time. So a faster node completes more transactions in a second than a slower node, but no bottleneck is created, as there is no need to wait on the slower node.
The next pool is the security pool. Nodes that have been checked and verified by Aphelion and are deemed to be trusted are constantly looking for various exploits and vulnerabilities. With Aphelion’s help they are surveying the big picture and ready to examine and solve all suspicious activities.
To increase security even more, the third pool is introduced that watches over the watchmen in the second pool. The audit pool conducts tests and checks to the other nodes without those nodes knowing if they are solving a real issue or being subjected to a test. If a node becomes suspicious through its actions, it is the audit pool nodes that will flag them and, in dire cases, remove them from the network.
As the system is fast and self-reliant, Aphelion decides where each node will work and what tasks will it do. If a node leaves the network or it considered untrustworthy, a stand-by node from the fourth pool, the maintenance pool, takes its place, thus ensuring a constant flow of uninterrupted work.
As Aphelion is so flexible and self-reliant, it can communicate any important changes throughout all the network, being able to adjust it without creating forks. A blockchain that never grows old or obsolete, as it can be updated on the fly with no interruption, no forks. Because of this flexibility and unique architecture, it can also bridge two completely foreign blockchains and actually making them interoperable. Libonomy blockchain is already interoperable with Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, opening countless doors for interoperable solutions.
Aphelion works in following steps:
1. Nodes join the Libonomy network.
2. Nodes go through an extensive evaluation process which will decide their place in different pools of the network. This data will help to predict the performance of the node in the network.
3. After the power index is gathered from nodes, Aphelion algorithm assigns them to one of the four pools:
• Power Pool is where all the transactions and activities take place;
• Exploit Finding Pool runs a security and performance check on the nodes;
• Audit Pool runs an auditing of the nodes in the network and broadcasts the rules over the whole network;
• Maintenance Pool is where extra nodes are awaiting to be distributed to other pools.
4. Transaction is received and announced to power pool nodes for verification.
5. Aphelion generates the rules for transaction verification among the nodes which allows the protocol to make an autonomous decision in adding the transaction to the respective block or it makes the decision based on prediction from previous dataset using classification agents.
6. After the transaction has passed the verification round from the nodes and the autonomous path directed by the protocol itself, the verified data is then forwarded to the audit pool in order to ensure that the verification carried out is valid.
7. Audit pool scores the whole process carried out by the nodes and classification agent using a scoring mechanism for future improvements.
8. The nodes from the respective pool instantly transmit information to the whole swarm with multi-layered gossiping.
9. The nodes will receive rewards for voting and validating the blocks.
10. Aphelion consensus learns through each dataset, and the more it learns the better it is able to predict and detect the performances, and hold the decision-making power.
