Overview

The Jin Network blockchain, as shown in Figure 1, is comprised of a set of validators that jointly receive and process transactions from users using a byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT ), proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. Token holders lock up, or stake, tokens in their selected validators. Each validator’s consensus voting weight is proportionate to the amount staked into it. A validator can be active and participate in consensus. Likewise, a validator may also be inactive if it does not have enough stake to participate, rotates out of the validator set, elects to be offline as it synchronizes blockchain state, or is deemed not participating by the consensus protocol due to poor historical performance.

Clients are any part of the system that need to submit transactions or query the state and history of the blockchain. Clients can choose to download and verify validator signed proofs of queried data. Full nodes are clients that replicate the transaction and blockchain state from the validators or from other full nodes in the network. They may elect to prune transaction history and blockchain state as desired to reclaim storage. Light clients only maintain the current set of validators and can query partial blockchain state securely, typically from full nodes. Wallets are a common example of a light client.

To meet the needs of safe, fast, reliable, and upgradeable web3 infrastructure for widespread adop- tion, the Jin Network blockchain is built on the following core design principles:

• Fast and secure execution along with simple auditability and mechanical analyzability via a new smart contract programming language, Move [5]. Move originated with the predecessor to the Jin Network blockchain and continues to progress with the evolution of this project.

• Extremely high throughput and low latency through a batched, pipelined, and parallelized ap- proach to transaction processing.

• Novel parallel transaction processing that efficiently supports atomicity with arbitrarily complex transactions through Block-STM, unlike existing parallel execution engines that require upfront knowledge of data locations to be read and written.

• Optimizations for performance and decentralization via rapid, stake-weight validator set rotation and reputation tracking

• Upgradeability and configurability as first-class design principles to embrace new use cases and the latest technology.

• Modular designs that enable rigorous component level testing along with appropriate threat modeling and seamless deployment, all ensuring highly secure and reliable operations.

• Horizontal throughput scalability while preserving decentralization, where sharding is a first-class concept exposed to users and native to the programming and data model.

Section 4 explains how developers interact with Move in the Jin Network blockchain. Section 5 describes the logical data model. Section 6 details how the Jin Network blockchain enables a safe user experience through strong verification methods. Section 7 describes key performance innovations around pipelining, batch- ing, and parallelization. Section 8 details various options for different clients to synchronize state with other nodes. Section 9 describes our plans for community ownership and governance. Finally, Section 10 discusses future performance directions while maintaining decentralization.