What Is Ontorand Consensus Engine (Ontology)?

Ontorand Consensus Engine is VBFT (Verifiable Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus mechanism on the Ontology blockchain.

VBFT is a combination of proof of stake, verifiable random function, and byzantine fault tolerance. Conventional blockchain requires each node in the network to have a complete copy of the blockchain, thus making it hard for the nodes to scale. By combining proof of stake, VRF, and BFT, the Ontology Consensus Engine (OCE) creates a blockchain that can theoretically allow near-infinite scalability, excellent security and speed.

Ontology blockchain is a public blockchain project and distributed trust collaboration platform. It makes decentralized trust systems available to everyone, connecting different blockchains, improving the efficiency of business applications, and providing mainstream users with the ability to use public blockchains without having to know about their technical implementations. 

As the Ontorand Consensus Engine operates on VBFT (Verifiable Blockchain Fault Tolerance) technology, the processing power of consensus is doubled to mitigate faults. It uses the proof-of-work algorithm and ensures nodes verify transactions on the VBFT blockchain by making them perform computations on it.  

The VRF is part of an innovative cryptographic scheme that uses pairings to create a new, equally secure but much simpler function. It is more powerful than traditional two-party protocols such as those that rely on Diffie-Hellman (DH) or Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH), and in many cases, it provides the same level of security with fewer steps.

Byzantine fault tolerance is a fault-tolerant consensus protocol. The algorithm ensures that if an arbitrary number of processes fail, the system still works. This is critical for distributed systems, where we cannot rely on a central server to dictate and validate the execution of a networked application. The term byzantine fault tolerance is used to describe fault-tolerance in computer systems in which failures may be caused by Byzantine faults (i.e., arbitrary faults that are not due to faulty hardware alone, such as software crashes). This is in contrast to the use of more typical terms like "fault tolerance", which implies that only failed hardware is held to be a source of potentially erroneous behavior.

What differentiates VBFT from other consensus algorithms is its tight integration with the governance model of the Ontology blockchain. It’s adapted to operate on the defined parameters of Ontology without affecting the randomness and fairness of the consensus process. With the help of VBFT,  public blockchains can improve both performance and scalability. It consequently allows dApp developers to bring out their creativity the best way – the blockchain ecosystem relies on dApp developers hugely. VBFT has a long way to go and it’ll only improve with time.