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ABSTRACT
Despite the undeniable growth of the Ethereum ecosystem and community of users and developers,
mass adoption still hasn’t happened. This is because there are various challenges to overcome affecting
the entire community specially the developers. This is, scalability or the lack of it which results in slow
and expensive transactions; usability limitations due to the low flexibility offered to developers, the
“one-size fits all” nature of the EVM as well as the lack of programming languages available which
greatly limit developers ability to customise the framework to the specific needs of their projects.
Moreover the lack of blockchain interoperability results in siloed blockchain ecosystems which cannot
communicate with each other.
Taking these factors into account we have built EtherLite to provide fast transaction finality and higher
throughput with lower gas fees and creating a developer friendly framework which is easily customis-
able to specific use cases. EtherLite aims to further enable mainstream adoption of the Blockchain
promoting decentralised community building.
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EtherLite is a community driven application- A smart contract is code that lives on the
specific blockchain that is customized for the EtherLite Virtual Machine and runs exactly as
business logic defined by a stand-alone applica- programmed. Once a smart contract is de-
tion. EtherLite’s architecture leverages the ployed on the network it can't be changed. It is
Proof-of-Stake functionality and EVM resistant to fraud, censorship and third party
compatibility. interference. One of the characteristics of a de-
centralized application, as described above, is
EtherLite is fully compatible with Ethereum that it is controlled by the logic code written
meaning that any smart contract, DAO, and into the smart contract running behind that
decentralised applications will work on Ether- dApp which is what makes it decentralized as it
Lite. Not only it is fully compatible with is run by a contract, not an individual or a
Ethereum as well as it is faster, cheaper, and company.
more adaptable and it offers instant finality,
opening a new array of options for developers. 2.3 EtherLite Virtual Machine
In order for a web app to interact with the The nature of the blockchain, a distributed
EtherLite blockchain (i.e. read blockchain data ledger that records transactions across the net-
and/or send transactions to the network), it work requires validators to store and update
must connect to an EtherLite node. this ledger. These validators have a major role
which is to determine which transactions have
Web3JS is a popular library that allows pro- settled, therefore there must be an agreement
grammers to interact with the EtherLite across the validators, otherwise called, to solve
blockchain. It represents a JavaScript language the Byzantine General’s Problem or otherwise
binding for EtherLite’s JSON RPC interface, called consensus.
which makes it directly usable in web technol-
ogy, as JavaScript is natively supported in al- Satoshi (2008) solved the Byzantine General’s
most all web browsers. Problem implementing Proof-of-Work (PoW)
with the release of Bitcoin and this is the most
widely used consensus mechanism. PoW
requires validators in this case miners, to solve
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a mathematical puzzle which is to find the If the network detects a fraudulent transaction,
nonce of the last recorded block and add that a penalty will be applied where a substantial
block to the blockchain. The miner who solves part of the forger’s stake, if not all, will be
the puzzle first is rewarded with a fraction of slashed and they will automatically lose their
the blockchain native coin turning PoW into a right to participate as a forger in the future.
competition to update the blockchain. This has
Proof-of-stake offers a solution to the above
proved to be an extremely secure and trustwor-
mentioned limitations of Proof-of-work. Firstly,
thy consensus mechanism. However PoW re-
it very much reduces the barriers to entry which
quires brute force only and no skill, hence it
were the huge initial hardware set up costs as
uses up immense computer power resulting in
well as the energy consumption. In terms of
high electricity consumption. On top of this,
decentralisation, there are less concerns about
miners incur huge set up costs and as more
energy consumption and it is relatively easy to
miners begin to run nodes on a blockchain, the
participate in PoS therefore a much larger
hash rate increases and so does the computation
group is able to participate and generate rev-
power required. Bitcoin alone uses more power
enue making this a far more decentralised
than an entire country such as Ireland (Vries
mechanism.
2018, p. 801) and on top of that as it gets more
difficult and expensive to mine, mining pools
are created to pool computational power to-
gether which in itself puts the entire decentrali- 6.0 Governance
sation concept at risk as there is a greater cen-
EtherLite is governed by its community of val-
tralisation of miners. Lastly PoW architecture
idators and delegators. Stakeholders can vote
limits scalability as each block can only contain
on proposals that change pre-set parameters of
a limited amount of data which in times of high
the system, organize upgrades or vote for
demand, can sometimes lead to long waiting
changes to the policies governing EtherLite.
for transactions which have to wait for the next
block to be processed.
In response to the issues with the PoW consen- 7.0 References:
sus mechanism, Proof-of-Stake (PoS) was cre-
ated. In a PoS system, the validators are also Ethereum:https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/
stakeholders as these people lock up a stake wiki/WhitePaper
inside the system. In contrast to PoW, PoS re- Ethereum Docs: https://ethereum.org/en/devel-
places competition (energy expend) by offering opers/docs/evm/
a randomly selected validator, who is also a
stakeholder, the authority to update the web3.js - Ethereum JavaScript API
blockchain. Once a node gets selected to forge https://web3js.readthedocs.io/en/v1.3.0/
the next block it will check if the transactions
in that block are valid, will sign and propose Blockchain Without Waste: Proof-of-Stake-
the block. Once enough nodes validate the https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?ab-
block, it is added to the blockchain. Validators stract_id=3183935
receive a reward from the transaction fees for Saleh, F., 2018. Blockchain Without Waste:
both successfully proposing the block and for Proof-Of-Stake. [online] Available at: <https://
validating the blocks. The staking acts as an papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?
incentive to deter reward proper behaviour and abstract_id=3183935>
deter fraudulent validations or block creations.