13. Consensus

The consensus part is only very loosely coupled with the rest of the system. The service communicates and interacts with other services via a set of standard network interfaces. The specific consensus algorithm used within the service is completely invisible from outside. The underlying algorithm can be replaced or updated independently from other services or the overall workflow. It is pretty much plug & play ready.

Arcology's consensus algorithm named multifactor, which is an upgraded version of the conventional PoS. For now, Arcology is using a general BFT implementation on the testnets with some major optimizations to the consensus workflow. The efforts have been focused on following aspects:

• Parallelization between the proposer and validators

• Metablock only

• Fine-grained locks for validator state synchronization

Arcology will move to its own consensus algorithm called multifactor in the future. Please check out Arcology’s whitepaper for more details.