The NEO team, which is hard at work building the Smart Economy of the future, has unveiled a key step in its move towards the NEO3 upgrade, releasing version two of its delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance mechanism – dBFT 2.0 – on its MainNet.
The consensus mechanism has been improved to guarantee immediate transaction finality and includes a recovery method to help failed nodes on the NEO network get back online with minimal disruption.
Through the addition of the commit phase of consensus which forces nodes to commit to a single new block, the problem of forked blocks has been eliminated. This makes the network much more stable and transactions “truly irreversible,” a vital component for the commercial use of the NEO blockchain.
This is different from rival blockchain, Ethereum, which currently uses an energy-intensive Proof of Work model to achieve consensus and relies on ‘miners’ to produce and validate blocks, creating the opportunity for transaction reversal due to forks.
Erik Zhang, founder, core developer of NEO, and author of its original dBFT protocol, noted the significance of the move as another step towards the full launch of NEO’s next major upgrade, NEO3. This optimized protocol is touted for release in 2020 and aims to make the NEO blockchain ready for large-scale commercial applications such as YouTube, Alipay, or WeChat. He said:
“With this improvement, dBFT will have more strict finality. Users only need to wait for one confirmation (15 seconds) to ensure the irreversibility of the transactions and prevent double-spending. This is very suitable for financial applications.”