Introducing the JURA Protocol
With the recent rise of dapps and token economics, the blockchain technology landscape has been constantly evolving to reveal newer technologies designed to facilitate the transfer of goods or execution of smart contracts in a decentralized manner. However: the speed and efficacy of dapps and smart contracts are fundamentally limited by the underlying blockchain protocol. Typically, when we think of decentralization, there’s a tradeoff: with increased security and decentralization come lower transaction speeds.
But why can’t we have our cake and eat it too?
With this in mind, we’d like to introduce the Jura Protocol: a paradigm-shifting suite of four technologies that together form the foundation for a robust new blockchain ecosystem. No longer do we have to worry about such a sharp tradeoff between finality and decentralization, but can have a system that can fully realize the potential of blockchain technology while still supporting all of the dapps and smart contracts that we know and love.
The Jura protocol is feeless, ultrafast, and provides the decentralized security required for users to rest certain that their transactions are safe.
What is Jura?
Again, Jura is a suite of four different technologies coming together to make a new blockchain ecosystem.
1: Fusus data structure
The Jura protocol is designed to treat sending and receiving transactions differently, with each individual user’s account forming a directed acyclic graph, or DAG, to boost system speed. With each sending transaction, the entire user’s transaction history is rehashed into a single new genesis block, thus effectively pruning the DAG, increasing lookup efficiency, and furthering system speed. The cyclic outward growth and subsequent fusing of information into a new genesis block unique to our system led to us name it the Fusus data structure. To prevent spamming and double-spend attacks, we’ve implemented a proof of verifiable random time (PoVRT) module with each sending transaction: each successive spending transaction will have to wait a pre-appointed, system-distributed, random amount of time before being posted to the consensus.
2: Proof of utility
Proof of stake (PoS) and proof of work (PoW) consensus mechanisms have been proposed and used previously in other systems, but are vulnerable to attacks from malicious users. In the PoS model for example, if I were to buy more than 50% of the stakes, I would be able to control the voting for the system. For our consensus mechanism, we have designed an entirely new framework called the proof of utility (PoU) system to validate transactions.
PoU essentially functions like a traditional credit score, or a multi-dimensional, evolving proof of work mechanism: we know the factors that go into establishing a good credit score, such as paying your bills on time and not defaulting on any loans. However, the exact formula in determining our credit scores is not well known. In our PoU mechanism, we take in account factors such as the age of the user’s account, the average interstaking time, and the last staking time, in addition to the size of the stake itself, in order to obtain a more accurate measurement of the trustworthiness of a vote: all votes are then weighted by their respective PoU scores. This way, a user cannot simply buy voting power (PoS system), and since the translation from user factors to PoU contribution is non-linear and bounded between 0 and 1, a user cannot boost his or her PoU score by focusing all of his or her efforts into one variable.
Most importantly however, users cannot game the system since the weights associated with each of the variables evolve over time: as the system demographics change, so do the weights. The adjustment of system-wide PoU weights and calculation of individual PoU scores, which will happen at regular time intervals on the order of days, won’t take much considerable computing power at all, but will serve to provide a lightweight, effective framework for ensuring a fair consensus.
3: Dynamically monitored and distributed sharding
Sharding then allows clusters of nodes to work together to form a local consensus, thus striking a balance between decentralization and speed. In our system, we use a multi-layered dynamically monitored and distributed sharding (DMDS) technique to enable parallel processing of requests and ensure that if a node gets dropped, it will be quickly rerouted to another active shard. In here, system storagers provide data storage to facilitate transactions, individual shards are overseen by a single monitor, and finally, a panel of high PoU value judgers functions as an arbitration committee should transactions be flagged as suspicious.
4: AI security layer
Finally, the incorporation of AI security and machine learning will allow our system to automatically flag malicious behavior and nodes as time goes on. Although this would be primarily an offline module in the first few years, over time, this feature will become more and more autonomous with increasing accuracy.
Jura Token Economics
In order to ensure a robust token economy, Jura has ample system rewards for catching malicious activity, providing storage, etc. And rest assured, we have enough system rewards to ensure for the functionality of the system for the next fifty to one hundred years, accounting for inflation and system growth. The system will also penalize dishonest nodes with staking penalties as well as penalties to the user’s PoU score. Due to the construction of the PoU mechanism, there is little to zero economic incentives for malicious parties to initiate attacks, as revealed by game theory analyses and our comprehensive attack scenario simulations. Finally, this system is customizable to different industries and applications: while we intend to debut our system with IoT applications, the range of applications this system can tackle spans from medical records to finance to education to law.
For more information on this project, please consult our white paper over at https://www.jura.network/. If you have any questions at all about the Jura Protocol, feel free to reach out to any of us! We’re always happy to hear from the community. Also, we’re hiring, so if you think you’d make a community manager or become a part of our engineering or marketing teams, send us an email at contact@jura.network
