White papers
Community
Orbs Grant Program
Published August 2020
Orbs is committed to advance the process of decentralization by involving even more developers and teams in the development of the Orbs ecosystem and is introducing the Orbs Ecosystem Grant Program (OEGP). We believe that the special features of the blockchain infrastructure of the Orbs Network and the incredibly strong and active community in the Orbs PoS Universe together provide a unique opportunity to interface and collaborate with DeFi
Orbs Proof of Stake Universe
Orbs PoS V2: The Age of Guardians
Published July 2020
An overview of all the major features in the new and improved Orbs proof-of-stake mechanism
Orbs Technology Overview
Orbs Technology Overview
Published May 2019
An overview of all major technology and business aspects that make up the Orbs platform.
The Orbs Position Paper
Working papers
Use of Ethereum as a Base Layer for PoS and PoA Platforms
Published February 2019
We designed Orbs for applications that make use of multiple blockchain platforms (i.e. a hybrid system) because we believe such design makes more sense for complex, real-world use cases. In this paper, we would like to highlight some of the advantages and challenges hybrid designs can bring to infrastructure projects.
Blockchain Virtualization: A Necessity for Real-World DApps
Published August 2018
In this paper we explore how virtualization solved significant barriers in web application backends, analyze the barriers experienced with current-generation blockchain technology, and explain how virtualization technology offers the potential to overcome these barriers.
Eliminating the Security-vs-Scalability Dilemma: Randomized-Committee Consensus Protocols
Published August 2018
Current-generation blockchain protocols can determine their level of decentralization on an security-performance spectrum. A new family of consensus protocols enable the maximization of both security and throughput by employing novel cryptographic techniques for trustlessly generating random seeds in a group, without allowing any party to manipulate or predict the randomization results.
Blockchain Architecture Considerations to Compete with PaaS/Cloud Services
Published August 2018
In this document we present our findings, along with some architecture designs that may be used to create a blockchain platform that is competitive with centralized platforms. These aspects include cost structures, system performance when scaling up, avoidance of platform lock-ins to reduce technical risks, and completeness of the smart contracts environment.
Research papers
Helix Consensus Algorithm
Published April 2018
An introduction to Helix, a decentralized, scalable and fair consensus algorithm.
*A concise version of this paper is now in proceedings of the 26th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP ’18). For citations, please refer to the official IEEE page at https://ieeexplore.ieee.
Enforcing Fairness in Blockchain Transaction Ordering
Published May 2019
In this work, we propose a toolbox of techniques to enforce fair block selection for improved quality of service.
*A version of this paper is now in proceedings of the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, http://icbc2019.ieee-icbc.org/.
Fully Distributed Group Signatures
Published April 2019
A group signature scheme is a powerful primitive by which one can sign a message as a member of a well-defined group without leaking one’s individual identity, but the group manager can revoke this anonymity and reveal the identity of the signer. We present two highly efficient fully distributed group signature schemes in this paper.
Rational Threshold Cryptosystems
Published January 2019
We propose a framework for threshold cryptosystems under a permissionless-economic model in which the participants are rational profit-maximizing entities. The key threat to rational threshold cryptosystems is collusion—by cooperating `illegally’, a subset of participants can reveal the cryptosystem’s secret, which, in turn is translated to unfair profit. Our countermeasure to collusion is framing.
Accelerating Decentralized Execution of Blockchain Transactions Towards Centralized Performance
Published August 2018
To allow scalability, we suggest a decentralized execution model in which network nodes interact with a stronger accelerator.
Bloom Filter with a False Positive Free Zone
Published April 2018
A bloom filter is a probabilistic data structure for set representation with relatively low data storage use.
*This paper appeared at IEEE Infocom, April 2018 – https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8486415.
Token specifications
Proof-of-Stake Ecosystem Model
Published March 2019
The Orbs Proof-of-Stake (PoS) ecosystem is the back bone of the Orbs network and the Universe that is being created. This document is provided for discussion purposes and presents the PoS architecture and model in its Year Zero genesis, implemented in V1.
Orbs Token Distribution
Published April 2019
This document explains the use of the ORBS token, the total supply and distribution pools.
Orbs Operation Fees
Published March 2019
This list of operation fees provides the specifics of how the overall vision of stable and predictable operation fees will be implemented in the Orbs network. The goal of predictability is accomplished because the purchasing power of ORBS tokens is fixed as equal to a defined amount of computing power.
