Domino – A Highly Scalable Blockchain Using AI for Mass Adoption

It is widely recognized blockchain technology faces the trilemma of scalability, security, and decentralization. Developers are forced to make trade-offs. Bitcoin network trades scalability for security and decentralization to process about 7 transactions per second (TPS). Ethereum makes a similar trade-off to process about 15 TPS. Several projects can achieve 1000-3000 TPS by reducing the degree of decentralization. In comparison, a centralized network such as Visa can process over 25,000 TPS. To gain mass adoption and compete with centralized networks, blockchain needs to scale.

Many projects attempt to achieve scalability by sharding, including Ethereum 2.0. Sharding requires partitioning of the network into multiple shards, and each shard will achieve consensus on its own. By definition, sharding reduces the number of participating nodes and potentially increases the chances of a 51% attack.

A major reason that blockchain cannot scale is that transactions are received in a different order by different nodes. It is time-consuming for nodes to agree on the order. Bitcoin and Ethereum force mining nodes to use a lot of electricity to find solutions to a hard computational puzzle. Whoever solves the puzzle first gets to decide on the order of the transactions and create the next block in the blockchain. Domino Blockchain uses the following approaches to solve the seemingly insolvable trilemma and create a blockchain that is scalable, secure, permissionless, and with unlimited participation and decentralization.

Domino creates a cryptographic hash order for all received transactions. Transaction ordering is no longer determined by the block producers. Instead it is determined by the cryptographic hash algorithm and persisted to the blockchain. We call this Proof of Time (PoT). This is conceptually similar to Solana’s Proof of History (PoH, Reference 1), but with important differences in architecture and implementation. Domino uses a special Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm called Fast Byzantine Agreement (FBA, Reference 2) as consensus for block production and validation to achieve transaction finality in 3.5 seconds. Domino introduces a hybrid validation model to enhance security while maintaining unlimited participation and decentralization. We introduce a new decentralized firewall, composed of mobile devices and laptops around the world, used to endorse transactions and surveillance block production and validation. Any device can join the network to perform these functions and get rewarded. Endorsement of transactions is done by sampling random nodes and obtaining sufficient staking. This process can greatly reduce the number of erroneous transactions. An unlimited amount of nodes can be used to perform this function (we call it surveillance nodes or decentralized firewall). Block production and validation is performed by a set of high-bandwidth and high-performance commercial-grade servers (we call them core nodes). The core nodes are distributed all over the world. Surveillance nodes are only involved with surveillance of the blockchain and endorsement of transactions. They do not produce blocks. By separating blockchain surveillance from block production/validation we enable unlimited decentralization, extensive participation, and enhanced security through surveillance. Any mobile device and computer can join the network without permission and hardware restrictions.