PAI Hybrid Consensus: A Roadmap
Phase 1: Core Technology Development
What’s the goal? The goal of Phase 1 is to successfully implement the core technology underlying PAI Coin’s proposed Hybrid Proof-of-Work (PoW) / Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. You can read the technical details of the proposed approach here.
What kind of work is involved? It is purely software development work.
What’s the final deliverable? When Phase 1 is complete, a stable, production-ready codebase implementing PAI Coin Core based on Hybrid PoW/PoS will be available on Project PAI’s GitHub. In fact, the code is already available while work is in progress.
When will this work be done? The target completion date is May 2020.
Phase 2: Testnet Launch
What’s the goal? There are several goals of Phase 2:
- To plan for and simulate the blockchain fork required to switch from the existing PoW protocol to the Hybrid PoW/PoS protocol (see Phase 4).
- To comprehensively test the work done in Phase 1.
- To set the stage for the development and testing of the work planned for Phase 3.
- To get YOUR feedback on the Hybrid protocol.
What kind of work is involved? Phase 2 involves a variety of work spanning such things as systems administration, quality assurance, testing, debugging, coordination, and marketing.
What’s the final deliverable? When Phase 2 is complete, a publicly accessible testnet version of PAI Coin using the Hybrid PoW/PoS protocol will be fully functional. Project PAI will have deployed geographically distributed seed nodes, miners, and stakers to form a mock P2P network in which anyone can participate.
When will this work be done? The target completion date is June 2020.
Phase 3: Transition of Dependent Services
What’s the goal? The PAI ecosystem comprises an array of applications that depend on PAI Coin. Some examples include:
- The PAI Block Explorer at https://paichain.info
- PAI Up Mobile Wallet
- PAI Up Web Wallet
- PAI Coin Pool
- PAI Pass
The goal of Phase 3 is to update and test such applications for compatibility with PAI Coin using the PoW/PoS Hybrid protocol.
What kind of work is involved? Phase 3, like Phase 1, is largely software development work, but spanning a much wider range of programming languages and interdependencies.
What’s the final deliverable? Upon completion of Phase 3, applications and services dependent on PAI Coin, such as those listed above, will have been updated and comprehensively QA’d against the testnet version of PAI Coin with Hybrid PoW/PoS from Phase 2.
When will this work be done? The target completion date is early September 2020.
Phase 4: Mainnet Launch
What’s the goal? Put simply, the goal of Phase 4 is to fork the PAI Blockchain and update PAI Coin to use the proposed Hybrid PoW/PoS consensus mechanism.
What kind of work is involved? Phase 4, being a rerun of Phase 2, involves largely the same type of work.
What’s the final deliverable? Upon completion of Phase 4, the PAI Coin blockchain will have successfully forked at a specified block height. Blocks added to the blockchain after that height must pass the validation criteria defined by the Hybrid PoW/PoS protocol. Mining and staking will be fully publicly available.
When will this work be done? The target completion date is late September 2020.
Beyond Phase 4: Proof of Useful Work
As many of you know, Proof of Useful Work (PoUW) is a PAI Coin inspired research project which aims to “recycle” the energy consumed by cryptocurrency mining. With successful implementation of such a protocol, the process of mining would verify blockchain transactions while simultaneously completing unrelated, but useful, computations. This summary and paper contain more information.
While PoUW specifically optimizes Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus, there is the possibility that PoUW could pair with Proof of Stake, paving the way for a Hybrid PoUW / PoS protocol.
Into 2021 and beyond, Project PAI will focus on this highly ambitious and exciting initiative.