COTI’s Trustchain is the base infrastructure for our systems and products. We have recently introduced our growth plan, product roadmap, and COTI Pay — that will include a new wallet, multiple assets, DeFi, Prepaid card, Fiat On Ramp, and more. Supporting such a huge growth in our processing volumes will require fortifying our network. Hence, it’s time for MainNet 2.0!

Since its launch in June 2019, the Trustchain has processed millions of transactions globally.

We are one of the few fully functioning DAG-based MainNet’s in the market and definitely the only one to introduce MultiDAG. MultiDAG is the world’s first platform to allow the issuance of tokens on top of a DAG base structure, the same way ERC20 tokens can be issued on Ethereum.

We are also the only one out there allowing node operators and stakers to take part in a payment processing transaction, rewarding them with COTI coins.

As our system grows, so does our knowledge and appetite to improve our product and network.

We have been researching and developing new ways to scale up a DAG and have been deeply researching into pBFT and threshold signatures.

We will scale and optimize up our DAG this year, introducing DAG 2.0.

We will also be introducing what is considered by many a tremendous technological achievement: a functioning pBFT on our network, upgrading our MainNet to MainNet 2.0.

Alongside the core development of our Trustchain infrastructure, we have been working on our Global Trust System, allowing other chains to leverage our trust scoring system, essentially allowing users to type in an address and get feedback on how trustworthy that address or entity is. Other than COTI’s Trustchain, of course, we’ll also be supporting the Bitcoin and the Ethereum network this year.

See here an estimated timeline for development:

In more detail:

DAG 1.0, our current system which we have named “Ant” has the following abilities -

• A decentralised solution designed to enable secure and trustworthy transactions. This solution relies on the distribution of Cluster responsibility to several types of Nodes, which are run by users. There are several node types in the COTI network: Full Node, Double Spend prevention (DSP) Node, Trust Score Node, History Node, Financial Node, Node Manager.
• Node Manager: the Node Manager in the COTI network allows seemingless deployment of nodes operating in the COTI network and allows anyone to join the network as a node operator and run any type of node.
• Trustchain Consensus: DAG 1.0 introduced a new approach to achieving consensus between transacting parties operating on a DAG-based data structure. The Cluster is a ledger, or a record of all transactions in the network, which is based on a completely decentralised DAG that is not stored by any central authority. The Cluster achieves scalability through its use of parallel source selection and confirmation of transactions, as well as its use of COTI’s Trust Scores. Each transaction in the Cluster receives a Trust Score equal to the sending account’s Trust Score. A transaction’s Initial Trust Score is used to define the unvalidated transactions (sources) which will be validated and referenced by the transaction, as well as the amount of PoT that should be performed prior to transaction attachment.
• MultiDAG — COTI’s infrastructure is not bound to one instance of DAG. The same infrastructure of nodes permits the creation of multiple DAGs for different originators and purposes. There can be voucher tokens, stablecoins of varying nature, dedicated tokens for global companies, or scalability tokens to speed up settlements in other blockchains. COTI will use several independent clusters that each support one token, which will make the whole network efficient and adjustable. The COTI MultiDAG ecosystem is similar to Ethereum, as a common decentralized infrastructure is the basis for a multitude of different tokens and smart contracts and one main coin for paying fees.

DAG 2.0 (codename “Bee”) will be all about speed and efficiency. With the introduction of DAG 2.0, planned for Q3, we’ll be introducing:

• DAG structure optimizations and improvements — in the new structure validation of transactions will have the ability to overcome missing transactions not persistent between nodes and retrieval and synchronization of all nodes DAG’s. By that init and sync process of new nodes will be significantly more efficient and fast. By deploying the new DAG structure the network will be able to scale up and support more transactions and nodes propagated through the network.
• ​Storage efficiency — The ClusterStamp: to prevent the growing Cluster from becoming unmanageable in storage size, COTI has implemented the Clusterstamp, which consists of two phases:

1. The last fully confirmed transactions (having both Trustchain consensus and DSP consensus) for each account have been found. The ‘last’ transaction means that there are no fully confirmed transactions confirming it. These transactions then become the genesis transactions in the next generation of the Cluster.
2. All other confirmed transactions are excluded from the working DAG kept by Full Nodes. All non-confirmed transactions are kept in the working DAG. The Clusterstamp process is performed automatically.​​

A successful payment system is supposed to process high throughput of transactions, circa ~ 1B transactions per annum. While most blockchain systems have a payload of transaction size of ~5 KB, it means that after one year of processing the network can generate several terabytes of transaction data. Therefore, it is not reasonable that full nodes store all of these data and will limit our scale. The clusterstamp will solve this issue and make our network faster and lighter.

• ​Build a protocol which will support ‘bridges’ between clusters:

1. Each DSP Node that receives a transaction propagates it to its strongly connected fellow DSP Nodes (in its own cluster) and to one DSP Node from each additional cluster.
2. The process in each cluster is similar to receiving the transaction in the initial receiving DSP Node. The transaction is propagated to all other DSP Nodes in that cluster and is then confirmed, signed, and sent back to the original DSP Node from the first cluster.
3. Each cluster has an ‘election’ where the validity of the transaction is decided, and the majority of votes in each cluster will be taken into account as the bucket’s verdict.
4. The cross cluster decision regarding validity will be chosen in the same manner. Each bucket’s verdict will be taken into account as one vote, and the majority of buckets will rule on the verdict.
5. DSPs will be evenly distributed among buckets in order to prevent small buckets from being able to influence the whole network.

Most blockchain solutions require that all system nodes be strongly connected to reach transaction consensus. This type of network topology does not allow high throughput and the support of parallelized transactions. Deploying our cluster architecture allows COTI to overcome the scalability challenge, approve transactions faster, and make COTI the most suitable to support a global payment system.

• Payment request — COTI’s unique solution for “One-click payment” for merchants and consumers. It provides consumers a “Pay with CRYPTO” button they can embed and integrate directly to merchants’ websites without filling the details about the merchant and the purchased item.
• ​Automatic Network Discovery Algorithm which will allow COTI to -

1. Reduces the risks associated with having a single point of failure in the network and further decentralizing it.
2. An automatic way to discover neighboring nodes (minimising the amount of time and effort the user would have to do to manage this manually).
3. A way to intelligently avoid the risks (as much as is possible) associated with accepting data from another node, without becoming reclusive or becoming locked into cliques.

​With DAG 2.0 (Bee) in place, we’ll have the required cluster to upgrade our network. In parallel to that, we have been deeply researching pBFT. With both abilities in place,
we’ll move from the Falcon era to the Eagle era, and from MainNet 1.0 to MainNet 2.0.
MainNet 2.0 will have the following abilities:

1. In MainNet 2.0 COTI will introduce our unique PBFT solution. The PBFT is a way for a distributed network to reach the consensus set for the Blockchain even if some nodes are malicious. In any distributed network, for a transaction to be approved, a certain number of nodes must agree to this. PBFT is the feature of the application to approve the transactions even if some nodes are not approving the transaction.
2. Presenting Initial Consensus Protocol for DSP — at the DSP-BFT stage, we plan to implement one of PBFT-like consensus variants in full. This stage includes:

• “view changes” or similar mechanism
• leader election
• “fast path” for processing most transactions

3. Deployment of Consensus (pBFT) in TestNet 2.0 — at this stage we plan to add non-transaction polls. It will be a “slow path” of voting because non-transaction (and not leader selection) polls are less urgent and should have less priority. This category of polls includes:

• new Full node adoption.
• DSP-nodes set reconfiguration.
• possible some distributed government polls.

4. Deployment of Consensus (pBFT) in MainNet 2.0 — at this stage we will deploy the new pBFT consensus mechanism to MainNet 2.0.

While this process is taking place, the Global Trust System will launch with support for the Bitcoin network in the coming weeks. It’s almost ready to launch. The data for the system will keep on growing and as more users join, the more trustworthy crypto will be.

With enough feedback, we’ll launch our system for Ethereum later this year to cover most of the global transactions out there and to fully encompass our payments ecosystem with the much-needed trust this system can potentially bring.

The Global Trust System will make COTI synonymous with Trust, which is a very required attribute for mass adoption and solves a major difficulty in the crypto world.

Stay COTI!

For all of our updates and to join the conversation, be sure to check out our channels:

Website: https://coti.io

Twitter: https://twitter.com/COTInetwork

Telegram: https://t.me/COTInetwork

Github: https://github.com/coti-io

Discord: https://discord.me/coti

Technical whitepaper: https://coti.io/files/COTI-technical-whitepaper.pdf