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An Overview of Argennon Properties:

  • Argennon is a cloud based blockchain. Argennon validators do not keep a local copy of the state data. Instead, the state is stored on a trust-less cloud of publicly verifiable database (PV-DB) servers.

  • By using cryptographic commitment schemes the integrity of data on the cloud is guaranteed, and there is no need for trusting PV-DB servers. At the same time, by using a smart clustering algorithm the network usage and the overhead of the commitment scheme is kept manageable.

  • Argennon uses a hybrid POS consensus protocol. A democratically elected committee of delegates is responsible for minting and proposing new blocks. Then, each block is validated by a large committee of normal validators. Every Argennon user is a member of at least one committee of validators. Thanks to the cloud based design of the Argennon blockchain, transaction validation does not require a large physical storage space and being a validator does not require costly computational resources. Everyone with an Argennon wallet can participate in the Argennon consensus protocol. This makes Argennon a truly democratic and decentralized blockchain.

  • Sharding decreases the security of a blockchain. Argennon does not need shards. Due to the cloud based design of the Argennon blockchain, validators do not need to validate blocks sequentially and the validation of multiple blocks can be done in parallel by different committees of validators.

  • By using a dependency detection algorithm, Argennon is also able to parallelize transaction validation of a single block. As a result, a multicore machine is able to validate the Argennon blockchain as fast as multiple independent shards.

  • The hybrid Argennon consensus protocol makes Argennon one of the most secure blockchains. Only one honest delegate can stop any attacks against the integrity of the Argennon blockchain, and if all the delegates are malicious, as long as more than half of the Argennon total stake is controlled by honest users, the Argennon blockchain will preserve its consistency.

  • The Argennon network relies on a permission-less network of PV-DB servers, forming the Argennon cloud. A PV-DB server is a conventional data server which uses its computational and storage resources to help the Argennon network process transactions. A large portion of incentive rewards in the Argennon protocol is devoted to PV-DB servers. This will incentivize the development of conventional networking, storage and computational hardware, which can benefit all areas of information technology. This contrasts with the approach of other blockchains that incentivize development of a totally useless technology of hash calculation.

  • By design, the Argennon blockchain is decoupled from cryptography. There is no hash based addresses and a user can easily change his/her private keys. Moreover, If at any time the cryptographic algorithms used become insecure, they could be easily upgraded.

  • In Argennon, operations are authorized by explicit signatures. This eliminates the need for approval schemes or call back patterns and encourages developers to better utilize the capabilities of digital signatures.

  • The Argennon Smart Contract Execution Environment (AscEE) is able to execute a smart contract as fast as a native application. This means that an Argennon smart contract is as efficient as the AscEE code itself. This way, performing costly mathematical calculations with a smart contract is not an engineering mistake anymore.

  • The Argennon Execution Environment protects smart contracts from reentrancy by low level locks. These locks will be opened automatically so there will be no risk of permanent deadlocks. The Argennon Execution Environment also provides deferred calls mechanism, which enables a smart contract to call back another smart contract without causing reentrancy complexities.

  • An Argennon smart contract can safely call external smart contracts. There is no way that a smart contract can affect its caller. Even the execution resources are separated and the called smart contract can not abort the execution of its caller by excessive gas usage.

  • Most of the arithmetic in the Argennon Execution Environment is done using floating point operations instead of unsigned integer operations. As a result, there will be almost no need for a word size bigger than 64 bits. At the same time, operations will have a bounded fractional error in contrast to integer operations that could have an arbitrary large fractional error.

  • The Argennon Execution Environment provides a built-in standard library. This standard library provides a secure and convenient way for implementing many frequently used functionalities. In addition, this library is updatable through the Argennon governance system. This means that bugs or security vulnerabilities in the AscEE standard library could be quickly patched and smart contracts that use this library, including non-updatable smart contracts, can benefit from improvements and bug fixes.

  • Argennon standards are defined based on how a contract should use the AscEE standard library and not only how its interface should look. As a result, users can expect certain type of behaviour from a contract which complies with an Argennon standard.

  • Interaction with Argennon smart contract is done through conventional HTTP. This enables Argennon smart contracts to have HTTP based RESTful APIs, documented by standardized descriptions like OpenAPI. This way, any client, including clients being used for conventional centralized web services, will be able to use Argennon smart contracts, regardless of how the API is implemented internally.

  • ARG, the main currency of the Argennon blockchain, is controlled by a smart contract. This eliminates the need for ARG wrappers and also makes the transfer logic of ARG more transparent and trustable.

  • Memory architecture of the AscEE completely hides the complexities of the Argennon blockchain. This enables AscEE compatible programming languages to have a flavour completely similar to conventional programming languages. For instance, the Argon language, which is the primary AscEE OOP language, supports composition, which is a very important OO design pattern.