DeMars

What is DeMars

Cryptocurrencies have become popular since Bitcoin [1] was introduced in 2009. They maintain a distributed ledger of transactions which are validated in a decentralized manner without requiring a trusted arbitrator. This is achieved using various consensus mechanisms.

The original proof-of-work mechanism proposed in Bitcoin relies on solving a cryptographic puzzle and leads to high electricity costs and the concentration of mining power in places with cheaper electricity. Alternatives include proof-of-stake algorithms in which the voting power is decided based on the amount staked by an user. These users then reach consensus using algorithms like PBFT or XFT. However, though this reduces the cost of expensive computations, the voting power is concentrated in the hands of users with more money. Moreover, high storage and bandwidth requirements make these systems difficult to realize in areas with poor internet services and expensive hardware. The users in such areas often only have access to mobile phones. With mobile devices, storage is limited and though newer devices are computationally capable, they are limited by their batteries.

To address these challenges, D´eMars proposes a blockchain that can run trustlessly and securely with low computing and low data transfer requirements. Nodes are fully autonomous and do not depend on third parties or other nodes for full validation. It runs on a structured peer-to-peer network based on hypercube geometry. Hypercube geometry is based on a concept of measurable node proximity by using Hamming distances between nodes and provides an efficient navigation algorithm to communicate with defined neighbourhoods. This provides D´eMars with unbiased network zones at different points in time which are responsible for electing proposers and validators which carry out consensus messaging within the boundaries of the zones.

D´eMars deviates majorly from most blockchain solutions by the supposition that all blocks, which maintain all the transactions since the genesis block which in the case of Bitcoin involves a download of over 150GB of data (at the time of writing), are not necessary to validate a blockchain. Several properties of the D´eMars blockchain together allow the full validation of transactions even though nodes hold only a partial blockchain:

Details of each of these properties and how the combination of these properties achieve low data transfer rates, low computing requirements while not compromising trust, are covered in the next sections.

The low computing and data transfer requirements of running D´eMars means that mobile phones can participate in the network and no tiered node structure is required. A mobile node does not compromise its trust model and operates in the same capacity and independence as any other node on the network unlike most other blockchains where mobile clients have to either depend on 3rd party centralized API wallets or trust full nodes to reduce the data transfer load (SPV wallets). With Bitcoin, less than 10,000 full nodes validate transactions, with the node distribution skewed to a handful of countries. In D´eMars, all user nodes can participate in node validation.