Waterfall: A Scalable Distributed Ledger Technology

Abstract

Waterfall is a highly-scalable smart contract platform for the development of decentralized applications (dapps) and financial services. The distributed protocol is based on Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) with fast finality Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus. The Waterfall platform consists of the Coordinating and Shard networks achieving high transaction throughput due to parallelized block production. The DAG structure facilitates scalability, which is one of the main challenges of decentralized technologies. The Coordinating network maintains a register of Validators, and also assigns block producers, committee members, and leaders in each time slot. In addition, the linearization and finalization of the distributed ledger are performed in the Coordinating network increasing overall security and synchronization.