DEDIT.IO ON TOP OF THE ALGORAND BLOCKCHAIN

Dedit is the first notarization platform in Europe supporting the public Algorand blockchain.

Dedit platform offerings directly benefit from the unique features of the Algorand architecture, namely and above all: scalability, speed of transactions and cost efficiency, while maintaining the decentralization of the network and offering strong security guarantees; but also the native capabilities of Algorand L1, which enable the easy tokenization of digital assets (or any file for that matter) as well as all operations related to token purchases. All of this contributes to the high-quality authentication services that Dedit can offer its customers.

Dedit.io makes it possible to write to the Algorand blockchain to certify and prove the existence and originality of documents at a specific time.  It also allows the transaction to be signed with a private cryptographic key generated by the system at the time of registration, providing proof of authorship and certification.

The platform is designed to be used by a vast audience due to its ease of use. Additional functionalities include storing files in the cloud and forwarding them to multiple parties who can also sign them via the multiple signature function. The user can use the service directly from the Dedit.io online platform, which is also designed to be used in White Label or through API.

Thanks to its serverless, scalable API infrastructure, the platform is used by some corporate and institutional customers. It is also intended to be linked to any process, enabling any data flow to be notarized.

But let’s take a step back. Why is Algorand’s blockchain considered the ‘next generation’?

Since the success of Bitcoin, many other projects have emerged to build different blockchains. In particular, Algorand is a project conceived by an Italian Turing Prize winner, Silvio Micali, which aims to develop an ideal blockchain model characterized by three pillars present simultaneously, such as security, decentralization and scalability, thus solving the so-called “blockchain trilemma”.

How does Algorand solve the trilemma?

Algorand’s blockchain is the ‘next generation’ as it offers the possibility to remove the technical barriers that have undermined the mainstream adoption of blockchain for years. Thanks to the consensus mechanism called Pure Proof of Stake, Algorand ensures full participation, protection and speed within a truly decentralized network.

THE TECHNOLOGY

• Protocol participation

In Algorand, any online user who owns algos can participate in the consensus protocol. Therefore a user who wishes to participate in the protocol generates and registers a participation key, with which he can participate in the proposal and voting of blocks. Through participation keys, the security of a user’s algorithms is ensured, even if the node is compromised.

• Self-selection via a verifiable random function

Each block in Algorand reveals a new random and unpredictable selection seed determining which users should participate in the next round of the consensus protocol.

Each time a new block is committed to the blockchain, the seed is made public and visible. By evaluating the Verifiable Random Function – VRF – a user secretly checks whether he has been selected to participate. The VRF calculation, which is minimal and executable even from a limited device, produces a pseudo-random output with cryptographic proof that anyone can use to verify the result. By sending this proof, a user can prove to anyone they have indeed been selected to participate.

• Pure Proof Of Stake

What makes this protocol purely proof-of-stake is the fact that users are selected to participate in the protocol based on the stakes (thus based on the number of algo’s) they have. The VRF behaves similarly to a weighted lottery: it is as if each algo in an account received its lottery ticket. The more algorithms there are in an online account, the more chances the account has to participate.

• Achieving consent

Consensus refers to the way blocks are selected and written into the blockchain. Algorand uses the VRF described above to assign accounts to propose blocks for a given round. When a block is proposed, a committee of voters will vote on the block proposal. If the majority of votes come from honest participants, the block can be certified.

• Why is this consensus mechanism secure
  

Two essential features of the consensus protocol prevent powerful adversaries from bribing a sufficient number of users to control block generation:

1) The adversary does not know which users it has to bribe. The users who are asked to certify a new block are selected secretly and individually.

2) When the adversary realizes which users are selected, it is too late for him to take advantage of attacking them. These users have already fulfilled their responsibility in the consensus protocol.  In fact, although usually the validation of a single block requires more than one round of message sending (so theoretically, after the first round, the users would be identifiable), the novelty introduced by Algorand – called “Player Replaceability”- allows a different group of participants to be nominated for each round, effectively protecting the network from malicious actors.

THE ADVANTAGES OF ALGORAND

SCALABILITY

Because the Algorand protocol uses the Pure Proof of Stake consensus mechanism to select a small set of block proposers and verifiers randomly, users only need to receive a fixed number of messages to reach a consensus on the next block. This contrasts with previous Byzantine agreement protocols, which require each user to receive a message from all other users or rely on ad-hoc chains of trust.

Unlike proof-of-work protocols such as Bitcoin, Algorand’s consensus protocol does not require participants to solve cryptographic puzzles to propose or validate blocks. In Bitcoin, this computation is simply wasted work. In that case, the underlying puzzles must be made more challenging to maintain the desired block generation rate, thus increasing computational waste without improving blockchain performance.

In contrast, in the Algorand protocol, the computational cost that a single user faces involves the only signature generation and verification and simple counting operations. The price depends only on the number of users selected for each block, which is constant and not affected by the size of the entire network. If the computation becomes a bottleneck for a user, the increase in computing power will directly improve performance.

As a result, Algorand’s consensus protocol can scale to millions of users and support a high transaction rate without incurring high costs the users. The consensus is achieved in parallel as the block is propagated to the network, typically within seconds.