Cyber Republic Weekly Update 15

Supernodes, so it is important to vote
accordingly.
To understand what these nodes do, it's
important to know what happens before
the DPoS process. Elastos uses a dual
consensus mechanism: Proof of Work (PoW)
and DPoS. Elastos uses Merge Mining on the
Bitcoin blockchain.The PoW miners
produce the blocks and as stated in the
Elastos DPoS Supernode Election article:
https://news.elastos.org/elastos-dpossupernode-election-process/
“The 36 active nodes will confirm the
blocks previously produced by PoW
miners.”
Between the miners using PoW and the
Supernodes using DPoS, this is how Elastos
reaches full consensus for all transactions
made in the ecosystem.
For those interested in running your own
node on the Elastos network, you’re in for a
treat.There are several different avenues
available. Many in the community are
congregating together to build teams that
will run Supernodes.There have been a
number of proposals on how the payouts
will be properly structured and also ensure
there isn't any illicit activity between team
members and voters.
The first method is the use of the multisignature
function in the Elastos wallet.
Teams can set up a multisig wallet which
requires a certain number of pool
participants to sign the transaction.There’s
a maximum of six and minimum of two
owners to each wallet, and up to four
required signatures to sign off on
transactions.This ensures that multiple bad
actors would be needed to betray the trust
of a supernode team.
This may be the easiest method, but it may
not be the most ideal. Gandhi explains a bit
more why a multi-sig option may not be the
best course of action:“A multisig wallet is
the easiest solution in my opinion but it
has some deficiencies. For example, if one
of the pool participants wants to leave the
pool, you have to make a new multisig
wallet, transfer the 5k ELA to a new wallet
and register again for the election.” The
constant flux of changing team members
and creating new wallets may cause some
headaches and become somewhat timeconsuming.
Votes could be lost in the
process.This brings us to a potential
solution to this problem: creating smart
contracts to streamline the process
better.
Smart contracts are the method in terms
of divvying up ownership of a node and
distributing rewards to its voters. Gandhi
continues:“With a smart contract, one
could find a solution to sell their stake of
the node without the node having to go
offline.The smart contract (or a second
one) could also be used to share the block
rewards with the voters. For example, you
create a smart contract and deposit 5k ELA
in it as a pool. The node owners set how
much of their block rewards they want to
share with their voters (ie. 80% for voters,
15% for pool participants, 5% for running
and maintaining the hardware).The smart
contract detects automatically who is
voting for your node and distributes the
voting rewards. It doesn‘t make sense to do
this in every block because this would be
way too expensive, but let‘s say every 2
weeks and as a voter you only get
rewarded when you voted for the node for
the whole 2 weeks period. The smart
contract automatically distributes the
rewards to the pool participants”.The
Supernode pools can essentially automate
the process in distributing rewards
amongst themselves along with their
community voters through smart
contract.This would give many interested
parties peace of mind that everything is
being controlled by code.
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