In the 2nd PlatON Community Council hosted on Mar.17, 2020, PlatON Chief Architect Mr. Shenglin Li and Head of PlatON Tech Community Mr.Zhijing Fu shared the further details about PlatON’s consensus mechanism, economic model and the update of $200M LatticeX Grants.

Concerning Lattice Grants, Mr. Fu added, Grants is to facilitate the complete ecosystem building with PlatON ecosystem included, and co-host and govern an open and transparent community with all community members. According to the funding in stages principle, Grants will fund the programs fit LatticeX concepts as a matter of priority, including basic technology features researches, programs relevant to scalability, privacy-preserving computation, supporting tool, security, cryptography, education, community, etc., improvement suggestions for PlatON, and part-time developers. We sincerely welcome all individuals and enterprises to apply for funding from LatticeX Grants. The first winners of LatticeX Grants can apply for further funding for other projects on top of finishing the projects of which they’ve won funding from LatticeX Grants, and following the open-source protocol and intellectual property strategy. There will be exclusive incubation project managers who serve as the official contacts for all applicants/teams to provide update suggestions and all applications affairs for projects. Once the programs get approved, the incubation project programs will help push the development and delivery of programs until they’ve done.

Further info about application:

1. Application: all individuals/teams can apply for the funding from LatticeX Grants, and get the feedback within 2 weeks;

2. First trial: LatticeX Foundation may ask for the documentations of your project after evaluation and communicate with you about your project;

3. Review: the judges of LatticeX Grants will contact with the applicants/team for the funding further.

LatticeX Grants funding is now open to all applicants worldwide, please follow and complete the rules shown below to apply for funding:

Send your application email to: grants@latticex.foundation with:

1. Introduction of applicant/team: contacts info, professionals, experience, previous programs, achievements;

2. Programs you want to apply for (including category and program name);

3. The way you want to participate in (your job, expected delivery time, expected achievement)

Furthermore, LatticeX Grants has won endorsements from developers, experts in top colleges, node partners worldwide around the globe since it’s announced. LatticeX Foundation has received over 20 applications on basic technology features, projects relevant to scalability, privacy-preserving computation, supporting tools, security, cryptography, etc. from cryptography researchers, top colleges, node partners, and other communities, etc, within 2 weeks.

So far, PlatON has contacted with all the first applicants, and will select out the first funding programs of LatticeX Grants. After that, PlatON will officially announce the first Grants projects to PlatON community.

🌟Selection, Delegation and Profit of Nodes in PlatON Ecosystem

There is a Huge Difference of Node Profits, What’s the Profit Algorithms of PlatON Nodes?

Mr.Fu: The average profit of a staking interval is the total delegation profit of the latest 4 staking intervals divided by the total cost of delegation. Then annualize the average profit of a staking interval, and multiply by the number of staking intervals of current additional issuing which will be adjusted according to the average block production time.

With regard to the huge difference of node profit, there are three reasons:

1. The delegation profits of nodes are different from each other;

2. The possibilities to be selected of nodes are different, thus, the block profits are different;

3. The delegation numbers node received are different.

To put it simple, the profit and delegation numbers of all nodes are different, the numerators and denominators of formulas are different, thus, the profit of all nodes are different greatly. The big yields of all nodes seen from PlatScan are resulted from the excessive low staking rate on PlatON test net.

What’s the Reason that Caused the Excessive Low Possibility to Be Selected of an Active Node? How should the Node Improve the Possibility to Be Selected in Verifying Nodes?

Mr. Fu: Active nodes are chosen in verifying nodes at random, mainly based on the total staking amount, either the staking the node finished itself or the staking comes from delegations. We will select the verifying nodes based on the weight, and the block production rate as well in the future.

What are the Factors the Design of Modifying Delegation Reward based on? Is it Fair to Modify the Delegation Reward Randomly for Delegators?

Mr. Fu: Good question! First of all, the modification won’t take effect immediately after it is finished, but in the next staking interval instead. Thus, it’s not correct to say modify the delegation reward randomly. We could add more restrictions on the rule, such as extend the approval of modification. That is to say, it will take a longer interval to modify the delegation reward for nodes.

🌟Validator Voting

Whether If There are Several Blocks with the Same Height in a View? How Should a Validator Know Who He Should Vote for?

Mr. Fu: If the consensus protocol works as normal, there won’t be several blocks with the same height in a view. However, we could deny the potential risk that malicious nodes produce many blocks in the same height. Validators usually vote for the first block they received, and can not vote for other blocks in the same height. Validators can report once if they find several blocks produced by a validator, however, they can bot for other blocks in the same height.

🌟Punishment Mechanism

Is There Fine Plan for Zero Block Production? What’s the Improvement Strategy?

Mr. Fu: Currently, the punishment mechanism for zero block production is to fine, but just set to be 0. The parameter of fine could be improved to be parameter governance.

What caused the most concern of zero block production is the balance of security and node stability. We now prefer security, to punish the offline nodes and exclude some week or malicious nodes. The rule that offline nodes should be fined may a little severe, and injure other honest nodes accidently.

There are two improvement proposals, first one is to enlarge the judge circle, for example, punish the nodes that have been offline for an hour. The second one is to decrease the strict level of punishment, for example, to fine the zero block production nodes instead of enforcing the cancel of staking and locking, to cancel their qualifications to be selected as verifying validators for a period of time. We wish to get more invoices for the proposal from our node partners and community members.

🌟Security of Validators

Can You Share More Info about the Practice of Security?

Mr. Fu: Considering the security, PlatON has formed strategic partnership with world’s leading security audit platforms such as SlowMist, Runtime Verification, to ensure the stability and security of PlatON network. The best security practices of validators are shown as follows:

1. Pay attention to the vulnerabilities of OS and upgrade your OS once you find vulnerabilities. You can configure Advanced Anti-DDoS service;

2. Try not to launch other external service if the node mechanism is running

3. Try not to open your rpc port;

4. Try not to save keystore of node;

5. Monitor the random port using P2P;

6. Run PlatON program using non-root user;

7. Back up your block datas;

8. Collect and monitor your node logs.

🌟Privacy-Preserving Computation

What’s the Further Use Cases of PlatON? Is Privacy the Blockchain Social Apps or DeFi?

Mr. Fu: The use cases of PlatON in the future are: data computation and trading marketplace of data privacy, and a financial infrastructure. Blockstack is a decentralized computational network, a storage system that enables a user to choose storage location and authorize the access encryption. It’s a kind of simple plaintext computation on clients.

PlatON focuses on the computation itself instead of storage, to ensure the computation of data and dig the value of data on top of guaranteeing the data privacy.

How Doesn PlatON Combines Contract Engine, Consensus and Privacy-Preserving Computation?

Mr. Fu: Privacy-preserving computation works off chain, and the transactions of privacy-preserving computation include the initiation and settlement of computation, and the verification and transactions of computation results that perform on-chain consensus. The model of privacy-preserving computation can be developed using contacts, released on chain, and executed in the contract engine.

🌟Development and DApp on PlatON

Can I Develop DApp on PlatON?

Mr. Fu: Currently, there are two support system on new PlatON Baleyworld test net: EVM smart contract and WASM smart contract, and the latter one will be launched in early April. Welcome to experience it, and looking forward to receiving your suggestions.

Is it Possible to Transplant Ethereum EVM to PlatON Smoothly?

Mr. Fu: Currently, Ethereum EVM can be transplant to PlatON, except for some tiny compability issues. Welcome to verify PlatON using Ethereum contracts. For more details, please refer to the documentation on our official website, thanks.