Algorand Pure Proof of Stake Consensus
Prof. Silvio Micali combined state-of-art distributed computation, cryptography and game theory into the Algorand Pure Proof of Stake Consensus Protocol, to keep the foundational Blockchains' promise.
PPoS consensus is based on the Verifiable Random Function (VRF).
The VRF is used to create a fair, tamper-proof, secure and provable cryptographic sortition, in which people are free to take part as long as they own any amount of Algorand's native cryptocurrency, named ALGO.
Each "participating" ALGO acts as a ticket of a cryptographic lottery that secretly runs in parallel on Algorand network's nodes, for each new block, with minimal hardware requirements and neglectable energy consumption.
Users participating in Algorand PPoS do not delegate their votes, do not need a minimum stake to take part in the PPoS, and do not bond their ALGOs.
The cryptographic sortition is used to:
- Randomly and secretly elect a block proposer;
- Randomly and secretly elect a committee of validators for every proposed block.
Algorand PPoS solves Blockchains' trilemma acheiving at the same time:
- Scalability
- Security
- Decentralization
The point is: can we measure these properites?
Useful references: