Ontorand Consensus Engine (Ontology)

What Is Ontorand Consensus Engine (Ontology)?

Ontorand Consensus Engine is VBFT (Verifiable Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus mechanism on the Ontology blockchain.

Ontology blockchain is a public blockchain project and distributed trust collaboration platform. It makes decentralized trust systems available to everyone, connecting different blockchains, improving the efficiency of business applications, and providing mainstream users with the ability to use public blockchains without having to know about their technical implementations. 

The VRF is part of an innovative cryptographic scheme that uses pairings to create a new, equally secure but much simpler function. It is more powerful than traditional two-party protocols such as those that rely on Diffie-Hellman (DH) or Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH), and in many cases, it provides the same level of security with fewer steps.

Byzantine fault tolerance is a fault-tolerant consensus protocol. The algorithm ensures that if an arbitrary number of processes fail, the system still works. This is critical for distributed systems, where we cannot rely on a central server to dictate and validate the execution of a networked application. The term byzantine fault tolerance is used to describe fault-tolerance in computer systems in which failures may be caused by Byzantine faults (i.e., arbitrary faults that are not due to faulty hardware alone, such as software crashes). This is in contrast to the use of more typical terms like “fault tolerance”, which implies that only failed hardware is held to be a source of potentially erroneous behavior.