Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) is a consensus algorithm for blockchains designed as an implementation of technology-based democracy with a voting and election process to become a block producer. It was developed by Daniel Larimer to solve environmental concerns of Proof of Work systems such as Bitcoin and is present in projects like EOS, Cosmos and Lisk among others.

However, DPoS has its own shortcomings: a tendency to centralization due to the creation of coalitions, and a high barrier to become a block producer. To mitigate these issues, we have researched an improved mechanism to select and vote for the block producers.

This mechanism modifies the mentioned election process by introducing a source of randomness and improving the accountability for block producers. It also improves the efficiency and flexibility of the voting process which is paramount for the scalability of the algorithm. All these points will be presented in the discussion with as much detail as time allows. Moreover, the talk will include simple examples and analogies and will try to avoid unnecessary maths.

This talk is based on previous work published in [1-3].

[1] - Iker Alustiza, “Use Randao-based scheme to include standby delegates and reorder delegate list”, 2019, https://github.com/LiskHQ/lips/blob/master/proposals/lip-0022.md
[2] - Maxime Gagnebin, “Introduce vote locking periods and new vote weight definition”, 2019, https://github.com/LiskHQ/lips/blob/master/proposals/lip-0023.md
[3] - Maxime Gagnebin, “Punish BFT violations”, 2019, https://github.com/LiskHQ/lips/blob/master/proposals/lip-0024.md