The StoryA few years back I started working on blockchain and at that time I developed BTC+LTC dual mining chips and hardware, the technology was sold to a world-wide market. I then tried to develop an
IoT software platform based on blockchain technology, and after several months of trial and development, I encountered serious issues with scalability and the transaction fees were very high. Issues like these prevent mass adoption of the blockchain technology and ultimately drove the foundation of the
TrustNote open source project and its development of a fast, scalable, and light platform to provide high-performance for everyone on every device at a lower cost. This distributed ledger system will potentially make it a lot easier to implement, and scale new blockchain applications for a much broader audience, allowing more innovative ideas to flourish quickly.
A New BeginningAs a new Directed Acyclic Graph (
DAG) based distributed ledger ("
DAG-ledger"), TrustNote is designed to “enabling fast and scalable decentralized applications for everyone on every device at a low cost”.
In a DAG-ledger, each new transaction confirms at least one previous transaction, transactions are represented as “units” in the graph and are not grouped into blocks.
This is in contrast to many classical Bitcoin-like blockchain technology where the structure of the traditional blockchain is the bottleneck that hinders the technology from improving its concurrency. In a DAG-ledger, because there is no block, there is no block size issue. By decoupling branch selection and double-spending detection from transaction verification, and allowing nodes to verify transactions in parallel, in theory, a DAG-ledger can achieve unlimited scalability.
TrustNote is similar in design to, and influenced by DAG-ledgers like
Byteball and
IOTA. TrustNote takes the commonly used DAG consensus model a bit further and on the top of it, a proof-of-work based consensus scheme (
TrustME consensus) is proposed to encourage fair and trustable witness node selection through mining. Most of today’s DAG-ledgers have no incentives like mining. Without proof-of-work based incentives, it’s
much harder to achieve decentralized consensus and often
weakening the consensus on which it is based. Inspired by DASH’s
two-tier network architecture, TrustNote is trying to combine proof-of-work consensus and DAG ledger structure all together, building a more scalable and more secured distributed ledger system.
Taking lessons learned from the team’s experiences on IoT development, we believe the transaction fees equal to the size of the data being stored is the right approach, and multiple types of node protocols are developed to support Internet-of-Things and as many device types as possible:
- Super node: super nodes run on PC, server, Cloud host or mining systems, have better resources, hold a certain number of tokens, and have a well-behaved history on the record. Super nodes can host micro nodes. Miners are elected from the super nodes periodically in each consensus round.
- Full node: full nodes store a full copy of the ledger, fully enforce all the rules except don’t participate the mining operations.
- Light node: light nodes store a light ledger instead of a full copy, light nodes are easy to maintain and with support to smart phones or tablets in mind.
- Micro node: no ledger stored on micro nodes, transactions are delegated to super nodes, micro node is designed to support embedded devices or IoT devices.
Inspired by Byteball’s declarative smart contract, TrustNote uses advanced declarative
non-Turing complete smart contract not only supports complex application scenarios but also drastically reduces the difficulty of secure contract development in which we believe is one of the largest barriers to blockchain’s mainstream adoption. In addition, aiming to reduce the number of vulnerabilities residing with today’s smart contract systems, we want to take a new approach of making some restrictions on the runtime system, instead of limiting what languages can be used.
The current implementation of TrustNote is based on
Node.js, we are working on re-implement it with
Rust, and the next major release will include the long-awaited token platform. If you have any ideas or contributions you would like to be included please let us know.
How does the Token Distribution Work?TrustNote’s crypto-currency is called “
TTT”, TTT will be used in transactions and as mining rewards. TTT’s unit is called “
Note”, often specified in Mega Notes ("
MN"). A fixed supply of
one billion (1,000,000,000) MNs will be distributed and no ICO is planned:
- 255 million (255,000,000) MNs (25.5% of the total amount of TTT) were distributed to private investors during a 7 days period beginning on January 2, 2018 and ending on January 8, 2018.
- 50 million (50,000,000) MNs (5% of the total amount of TTT) are reserved for TrustNote development teams.
- 195 million (195,000,000) MNs (19.5% of the total amount of TTT) are reserved for the TrustNote foundation to support the ongoing development of the technology and its ecosystem.
- 500 million MNs (50% of the total amount of TTT) are mining rewards available for miners.
Want to Become a Miner?TrustNote’s main chain is expected to support mining by Q3 2019, while users can download the mining client and apply to become a super node, super nodes can become miners by participating the TrustME consensus and then get rewarded by issuing valid attestor units.
More information and discussion about mining please move to
TrustNote for Miners.
Get InvolvedBeing an open source project with
MIT license, you can freely modify, distribute and use TrustNote as we really want it to be yours, to see it grow and thrive in the open source community.
Contributions are always welcome and thankful, no matter how large or small. If you want to report an issue, help with documentation, contribute to the code base such as re-implementing of the TrustNote protocol with Rust, participate the live debate of our proof-of-work based consensus, or indeed anything, you can explorer our community resources to find out how you can help.
Roadmap- Team setup – Completed
- Proof of concept – Completed
- Main chain go live – Completed
- Multi-platform wallet – Completed
- Open source the code base – Completed
- TTT Private Token Distribution – Completed
- Multi-functional wallet release – Completed
- Digital token platform release – Completed
- Two-tier consensus (PoW) release – In progress
- Declarative smart contract release – In progress
- Micro wallet release – In progress
What’s Coming Next?See TrustNote 2.0
roadmap from Github.
For those who want to follow up our progress more closely, you are always welcomed to visit our
blog where we publish our project update biweekly, or meet us on
Twitter,
Telegram,
Reddit,
LinkedIn, and
Facebook.
What to Get Some TTT?Initiate transactions or issue tokens on TrustNote’s main chain will cost you some TTT Notes. You can buy TTT Notes from some of the cryptocurrency exchanges. TTT is now tradable with
BTC and
ETH on Bit-Z exchange since April 26, 2018. There are some other exchanges such as
a.mom also listed TTT as well. More to come and we will keep you informed here.
For those who like to do some test, you can get
TTT Test Notes for free. TTT Test Notes can be used to issue tokens and pay for the transaction fees on TrustNote's testnet, however it doesn’t work on the main chain.
CreditsTrustNote is largely based on Byteball’s
source code but also inspired by many other open source projects such as Bitcoin, DASH, IOTA, and Hyperledger Fabric. We are proud to be a donor of Byteball and we hope we can support more innovative open source blockchain projects in the future.
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Last updated on Oct 29, 2018
