ANTLIA - Beyond Interchange & Oracles

Antlia is an Interoperable and scalable blockchain with trusted smart contract based oracles for seamless data and asset sharing. Assume a web of blockchains where thousands of chains co-exist and every chain has its own metadata, data and cryptocurrency. In this case, users of one chain can only exchange and trade assets, data, services or goods from within that single chain. Currently, users of one blockchain cannot directly connect, exchange data or communicate with any other blockchain without having intermediary. Moreover, Legacy digital systems cannot exchange their data with any blockchain.

Blockchains as a standalone entity have failed to generate an effective impact in the real world scenarios. Antlia scalable blockchain aims to be an interoperable blockchain having oracles that solve such bottlenecks for interoperability. Antlia will link blockchain to blockchains and digital systems which will ensure high cross-chain exchanges efficiency and enhance resilience to fault tolerance. The end result has much higher security and improved throughput.

Our Antlia blockchain will be accompanied with interoperable dApps: Wallet, Explorer, Faucet and Antlia IDE for writing smart contracts “with smart contract templates based on web assembly” as the interfaces to interact with the Antlia blockchain. During the first phase of Antlia blockchain’s launch, a centralized exchange will also be instigated which will allow the users to become a part of the Antlia ecosystem. During the later stages, Antlia ecosystem will include DeFi tools that will help create a decentralized eco-system in true sense.

Consensus

Antlia has proposed an approach to consensus called rollover Proof of Stake “rPoS '' and its consensus engine is based on modified tendermint ''PBFT”. Antlia rPoS helps to achieve decentralisation with high throughput and security. rPoS eliminates waste from PoW’s computation of resources and centralisation of DPoS/PoS. Antlia consensus provides balance between liveness and safety. The Antlia consensus protocol provides high security through unbiased randomness generated at every 05 blocks’ proposal.

Modified Tendermint Consesus Engine

To understand why Antlia is using Modified Tendermint, it is extremely important to understand the Tendermint

PBFT base consensus engine. Tendermint is a byzantine fault-tolerant consensus algorithm used for

securely and consistently replicating an application on multiple machines. Being a BFT consensus

algorithm, Tendermint can work even if 1/3rd of the machines fail or act maliciously. Tendermint not

only has an authenticated encryption system for peer discovery but it also has a high throughput in terms

of less block confirmation time and Transaction Per Second (TPS) rate. Tendermint’s core responsibilities

include sharing blocks and transactions between nodes (blockchains) and establishing a fixed order of

transactions. Antlia will use tendermint protocol’s functionality of a blockchain consensus engine which

ensures that the same transactions are recorded on every machine in the same order. Every machine

whether faulty or non-faulty sees the same log of transactions and machine state. Another major reason

to use tendermint is its instant block finality. Tendermint’s Proof of Stake (PoS) is much more scalable

than traditional Proof of Work (PoW) consensus algorithm. However, Tendermint is accused of centralization

by the community. To improve decentralisation, Antlia brings a concept of rollover PoS algorithm.

Rollover PoS

In this section, we describe Antlia’s rPoS consensus engine and its basic concepts

Validator’s Selection Mechanism

Using Antlia’s rPoS, a number of validators will be selected; the validators set will not be fixed but rollover. The rPoS engine will randomly search for the validators on the basis of a number of factors such as health, liveness and safety. After every 50 blocks “roughly every 02 minutes”, new set of a validators will be selected from the pool with a 10% rollover rate i.e. within the five blocks mining time duration, the validator pool undergoes following changes:

1. The validators will be sorted in the ascending fashion on the basis of health, liveness and safety. Validators having best health comes first and vice versa.

2. The last 10% of the validators will be swapped with the new ones on the basis of the algorithm.

This sorting and swapping will allow new validators to enter, making the system more decentralized and trustless.

Voting Mechanism

The chosen validators will start voting on the blocks, therein, developing consensus on the list of transactions. The voting for consensus happens in repetitive sequences where a proposing validator proposed a block to validate the transactions. The chosen validators vote to either accept or reject the proposed block. The proposing validator is selected on the basis of their service to the community, number of blocks they have voted on, in proportion to their voting power. Like any byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithm

1. ⅔ of the total votes should be in the favor of the proposed block to be accepted

2. If more than ⅓ of the total votes are malicious, there will be a threat to a system in which case the consensus identifies the malicious nodes and takes an action against them mentioned in detail at a later stage.

Attack Prevention

Antlia’s Protocol will discourage the participating validators to act in malicious manner by introducing

the concept of “Grounding”. Antlia will actively stop the validators by:

1. Cutting some/or full stake.

2. Imposing grounding period on the validators so that they cannot propose a new block or vote for the new block.

Antlia’s Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC)

Antlia’s Inter Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol will allow the state machines-independent in nature to communicate. These state machines may be blockchains or distributed ledgers. This protocol will enable the communication among different state machines by acting as a communication bridge between them. The communication bridge will be called “Antlia Powerhouse”, more details will be given in the whitepaper. The goal of IBC is to achieve the real life application of multi-token wallet systems with multi-token transferring. This will be possible by achieving fully functional IBC. This will allow users to rely on a single wallet to transact across different blockchains which will eventually make blockchain to be widely adopted.

• Antlia will create an interface for blockchains to become interoperable by using IBC (Inter Blockchain Communication).

• Interoperability will ensure transaction management and concurrency control.

• Antlia will preserve the autonomy of blockchains such that the individual blockchains satisfy their own needs first.

• It allows blockchains to exchange data and assets across pre-defined networks while the data may not be manipulatable.

• Blockchains will not be integrated together, they will only be made interoperable.

Antlia Oracles

Antlia Oracles will be the trusted third party entities that will transfer data to and from Antlia blockchain and other data structures. They will simply function as a data supplier to the Antlia blockchain through smart contracts. Here, the smart contracts evaluate the incoming data from the oracle and then initiate an action in the blockchain based on the received information. The key of using Antlia oracles is that it enables blockchains to communicate outside of its network. It eventually brings data into the blockchain's consensus mechanism. Moreover, in Antlia, blockchain oracles will act in a way to supply data from the exchanges to the smart contracts of Antlia’s core network.

Connection between smart contract and oracle

A smart contract being a self-executing piece of code will evaluate data from Antlia’s oracle and will proceed an execution on the basis of that information. Here, smart contracts are not required to directly access information from the outside network which lightens their workload. Similarly, in Antlia, the data sources will not provide information to smart contracts directly. Through consensus-based oracles, this proceeding will be divided as follows:

1. Antlia’s oracle will collect the required-only information from the outside sources.

2. The information by oracle, will be passed to its smart contracts for execution.

3. After execution, smart contracts will pass the information to Antlia’s core network.

Antlia VM with smart contract developing tools

Antlia's first implementation of virtual machine will run on top of Antlia SDK application. The choice of VM language for Antlia is Web Assembly. This WASM virtual machine will act as an intermediate language that will compile the smart contract’s programming language into a portable VM.