PoAge Is Trustless

Canopy's Proof-of-Age

Canopy introduces a unique mechanism to allow trustless syncing of the blockchain:

💡 Verifiable-Delay-Functions are a cryptographic primitive that requires the execution of sequential work that is fundamentally resistant to hardware speedups.

In other words...

👉 VDFs are a reliable proxy for elapsed time

This enables Canopy to reliably utilizes a fork-choice rule of the oldest (age) chain

— allowing a syncing node strong subjectivity when choosing between two forks.

TL;DR: Like PoW — Proof-of-Age enables trustless syncing, but without the energy costs!

The Result: NestBFT

NestBFT uses Proof-of-Stake for:

• Energy efficient consensus

• Simple and self-reinforcing 'sybil attack' protection

• Instant finality with 20 second blocks

• Economic stability via bonding

... and Proof-of-Age for:

• Verifiable mitigation of Long-Range-Attacks

• An additional layer of security against emerging threats

• Extending security to Nested Chains by offering decentralized Checkpointing-As-A-Service

The combination of the two ensures NestBFT is fundamentally more trustless than legacy PoS systems.

Since trust is involved with Ethereum's Gasper and Tendermint's BFT — how much of Web3 is truly trustless?

Read the full specification of Canopy's Consensus!