Petrachor ár 

PTA

The Ariel Protocol is Petrachor's unique Proof of Stake v4 consensus. It provides probabilistic finality, meaning that there are no checkpoints - the chain with the most cumulative difficulty is the canonical chain. Miners can join and leave at any time, there is no minimum balance required, and all balances can be spent without restrictions. The consensus itself is very simple. Each miner creates a hash that includes a combination of:

• a timestamp that comes after the parent block timestamp, but not in the future
• the public key of the miner, and
• the stake modifier

Once a miner finds a hash meeting the required difficulty, they can sign the block with their BLS private key, and add transactions to the blockchain. Anyone running a full-node can easily verify that the block is valid by reproducing a hash of the 3 items listed above. Unlike Proof of Work, which depends solely on computational power, our miners are rate limited to one hash per second, so that virtually any device can be utilized to mine and earn block rewards.

The Boneh-Lynn-Shacham unique signature scheme is used for the core random beacon of Ariel. By also securing accounts with BLS, we pave the road towards future extensions, such as multisignatures, threshold signatures and aggregate signatures.

The elliptic curve used by our signature scheme is BLS12-381, a Barreto-Lynn-Scott curve. This curve was introduced in Sapling, the latest upgrade to the ZCash protocol, with the aim to improve efficiency and security while reducing memory intensivity.