I'm confused if this is just another PoS coin in the making.
Petrachor has been developed over the past 2 years, and the mainnet was launched on March 13. Everything in the description has been implemented.
Petrachor does use a Proof-of-Stake consensus, the Ariel Protocol. This works differently from other Proof-of-Stake smart contract platforms like EOS or TRON, because it does not use delegates. Every Petrachor node is an equal peer, and eligible to earn block rewards for contributing to the security of the network.
Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work consensus is similar to the Ariel Protocol. With Bitcoin, your hashrate determines your probability of finding a block, while with Petrachor your wallet balance determines this probability. The main innovation here is that computers are bad at creating randomness, but by using BLS cryptography, we are able to provide a secure truly random beacon to mimic the hashrate war that Proof-of-Work is famous for, but in an energy-efficient manner.
A blockchain protocol integrated to a fork of the ethereum source code, is that the reason why I'm seeing like eth addresses in your explorer?
Petrachor and Ethereum have identical address lengths and both are hexadecimal, but otherwise they are completely different. Ethereum uses ECDSA cryptography to generate a public and private key, while Petrachor uses BLS cryptography. The two are not compatible, so if you generate an Ethereum address, and send Petra to that address on the Petrachor blockchain, those coins are gone forever.
Why did we replace the signature scheme with BLS?
Many reasons, but I won't go into all of them. One cool thing about BLS signatures is that you can aggregate an unlimited number of them into one single signature. This will allow us to compact the chain data, saving space, and opening up new possibilities for light-clients running on mobile and other storage restricted devices.
What is your main use case for Petrachor?
You can probably see by now that our main focus is minimizing hardware requirements, bandwidth, and energy, which enables more people to maintain a copy of the blockchain, and ultimately maximizes censorship resistance. With this in mind, we have also changed the target block time from 13 seconds (ETH) to 30 minutes. That may seem like a long time, but again this choice is to reduce storage requirements, in particular block headers, which over many years can cause a large amount of blockchain bloat. But don't fear, we will be adding a payment layer for instant and confidential transactions, so you can use Petrachor with the same speed, reliability, and privacy as cash.
Petrachor also has designs to replace the Ethereum Virtual Machine with a new smart contract platform that will simplify and improve our ability to run decentralized applications. We will let you know when the new upgrade has been deployed.
