General Principle

Published by Mario Oettler on

Blockchain Introduction Technical – Beginner to Intermediate Lesson 20 – Introduction and Basic Functionality of Delegated Proof of Stake General Principle

In DPoS, users of the blockchain who hold funds can vote for so-called witnesses from a set of witness candidates. The elected witnesses are responsible for creating blocks (collect transactions, validate them, and compile them to a block), adding blocks to the blockchain, and validating blocks from other witnesses.

The influence of each user in the witness’ election depends on the funds he holds. The more funds a user controls, the higher his influence is in the election of the witnesses.

Note: Names of certain roles differ in various implementations. This can cause confusion. Sometimes witnesses are called delegates, bakers, block creators, or block producers. Here, we use witnesses for participants that create blocks and sign them. We use the term delegates for users that are allowed to introduce changes to the protocol.

Delegated Proof of stake was introduced in 2014 by Daniel Larimer as a consensus mechanism for BitShares. By now, many blockchains have adopted DPoS.

Among them are:

  • Tron
  • Steem
  • BitShares
  • Cosmos
  • Lisk
  • EOS
  • Neo

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