I first start with a briefly introduction of what DPOS is:
Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) is the fastest, most efficient, most decentralized, and most flexible consensus model available. DPOS leverages the power of stakeholder approval voting to resolve consensus issues in a fair and democratic way. All network parameters, from fee schedules to block intervals and transaction sizes, can be tuned via elected delegates. Deterministic selection of block producers allows transactions to be confirmed in an average of just 1 second. Perhaps most importantly, the consensus protocol is designed to protect all participants against unwanted regulatory interference.
In the last year, many crypto-projects started to works on cryptocurrencies based on the DPOS consensus model. As many of us, I participated to the Lisk token crowdsale; we very liked Lisk, the idea behind it, the DPOS model. Unfortunately, the Lisk project seems to be going nowhere: the forging is not yet enabled in mainnet, the code still need a lot of work and obviously more devs (I appreciate Oliver and his work on Lisk, but it’s an hard job).
From the codebase of Lisk, another project born; its name is Shift, an Ethereum-based project that switched to Lisk codebase 3 months ago. The project is going well, more devs than Lisk, the forging is enabled and working well and they have interesting features scheduled.
Few weeks ago, I found another project, Ark.io. My first thought was “oh, another Lisk clone”, but reading their landing page, that’s not the truth. Ark proposes itself as full ecosystem (not only a token), and as “a secure platform designed for mass adoption“. So the main goals seem to be the easy-to-use and the security of the platform. Another very cool feature, is the smartbridging that will provide hyper-connectivity between different blockchain.
Ark blockchain will use the Delegated Proof Of Stake with 51 delegates (while Shift and Lisk use a DPOS with 101 delegates) and 8 seconds block-time. An initial distribution of tokens (ICO) will start in few days (December 7) and will distribuite the first 125.000.000 tokens: you will be able to buy Arc Tokens with Lisk, Bitcoin or Ethereum. The countdown is also available on ethereumwisdom/events).
Join now the Ark ICO: https://tec.ark.io/