System Components

Key components

1Money Network is a scalable and secure Layer 1 protocol established as a payment, transfer, and settlement system for stablecoins that offers near-instant transaction finality. It consists of three main components:

1. The payment system empowers users to initiate, cancel, and recover payments, ensuring the liveness of all accounts. Transactions are finalized almost instantly after a consistent broadcast, enabling ultra-low latency and high throughput.

2. The checkpointing system, independent of governance changes, allows the network to discard old transactions from memory, ensuring optimal performance even under extremely high loads. By strategically scheduling checkpoints, the network can sustain transaction rates exceeding 250,000 transactions per second.

3. The governance system facilitates system-wide changes, such as adding or removing permissioned validators or adjusting fees, through a transparent and efficient process. Epoch transitions and checkpoints, which occur retroactively, do not disrupt the processing or finality of payments.

Key concepts

We define these concepts which are key features/components in the 1Money Network.

• Epoch: A period of time during which the set of validators remains the same.

• Validators: Permissioned Nodes (software running on commodity hardware) that apply the network's messaging and consensus protocol, and enable the network to operate in a fault tolerant, scalable manner.

• Quorum: A group of validators large enough to ensure reliability.

• Sub-quorum: A smaller group of validators, still significant.

• Certificate: A message signed by enough validators to be trusted.

Checkpoint vs Block:

The 1Money Network is a broadcast-based network which is different from a blockchain network. A Checkpoint in the 1Money Network represents a specific point in time that captures the current state of each account. Unlike blockchains, 1Money's finality is committed at the individual transaction level vs blocks.

The assignment of transactions to epochs and checkpoints happens retro-actively. Epoch transitions and checkpoints do not interrupt the processing of payments and do not affect their finality. Valid payments are immediately final after completing a consistent broadcast of the transaction. This near-instant finality allows for extremely low latency and gives the system its name. We add a governance system to allow making changes such as adding or removing validators or changing fees and other protocol parameters. Epoch transitions necessitate creating a checkpoint, where validators agree on the state of the system for a given set of latest transactions.

Partitioning of transactions by epochs and checkpoints

Roles and their actions

• Account owner: send and receive transactions; account owners have three ways to interact with the system: they can either query a pull notification about the current state from a validator (trusted for liveness) and then broadcast a transaction themselves, or they can use one of the following options:

  • Wallet: a light-weight software client that can send transactions and subscribe to push notifications for selected accounts

  • Mirror or archive mirror: subscribes to all message notifications and keeps track of the full state, either since the last checkpoint (mirror) or since genesis (archive mirror); responds to state queries by any party

  • Relayer: a special service that relays payments on behalf of an account (only needs to be trusted for liveness) either by broadcasting directly to all validators or by submitting them to a relayer (trusted only for liveness), receive payments

• (Standard) validator node: checks submitted payment transactions for correctness, signs correct transactions, keeps a log of transactions since the last checkpoint, signs governance proposals, votes in consensus (required for checkpointing)

• Archive node: a validator node that keeps a log of all transactions since the beginning; running a validator node as an archive is optional and it provides full audibility; it is voluntary and the protocol does not punish validators for running only a standard node

• Operator: mints and burns the native token, issues governance proposals for the next epoch