Delegated Proof-of-Stake

Several successful attempts have been made to eliminate proof-of-work and fully replace it with proof-of-stake. Several “high-ranking” crypto projects (EOS, Tezos, Lisk, BitShares, Nano, Ark) have implemented a delegated proof-of-stake (DPOS), or based their consensus mechanism on DPOS principles (Cardano). In DPOS all participants can vote for a few nodes by delegating their coin balances to the nodes they trust. The more votes (the greater stake balance) the node receives, the higher its position and the possibility of being elected as an authorizing node.

It is preferable that the voting currency has a finite supply and be fairly distributed among the network participants. LYR tokens are used as the voting token. Account holders can vote for an authorizer by their account balance. Each voting account is "linked" to a particular authorizer. The dividends come from transaction fees which the authorizer earns by participation in the authorization process. This way, all users are motivated to vote as they participate in Lyra rewards sharing, i. e. account holders become stakeholders of the Lyra system.

In traditional centralized payment systems such as Visa or PayPal, the earnings are received by the corporation that owns the network, and some part is distributed to shareholders. In LYRA, all the earnings are shared directly between the authorizers and voting account holders, with no corporate bureaucracy in the middle.

Authorizer Nodes

Currently, there are 19 primary authorizer nodes. Other nodes with votes > 1M LYR are candidate nodes.

A candidate node that receives more votes than any primary authorizer node becomes a primary authorizer, while the primary authorizer with least votes moves back to the candidates pool.

Note 1: The more primary authorizers we create the more time and computational power is required for reaching consensus (getting transaction authorization).

Note 2: More primary authorizers does not necessarily mean more decentralization. For example, Bitcoin mining is consolidated within a few big miners and yet Bitcoin is still considered a fully decentralized blockchain.