I would like to inform the community that as part of the launch of the Lisk Platform and the releases of all our products, we will change the terminology around the Lisk consensus protocol by moving from DPoS-based terminology to PoS-based terminology. In short this means the following:
- Instead of delegates we refer to the blockchain nodes in charge of generating and finalizing blocks as validators.
- Instead of voting we refer to the action of locking an amount of tokens to support a certain validator as staking.
For all LIPs that are part of the Sapphire phase, the terminology is already updated in this PR.
Motivation
The main motivations for the change of terminology is the following:
- Lisk originally started with a DPoS protocol with 101 delegates and 101 votes that was very close to the DPoS protocol conceived by Dan Larimer in 2014 and first used in BitShares. As part of Lisk Core 3.0, we already greatly changed and improved the protocol, to make it more robust, fair and efficient (see LIP 0022, LIP 0023 and LIP 0024 for details). For the next Mainnet release, we are adding reward-sharing (see LIP 0070) and dynamic block rewards (see LIP 0071) to the protocol, moving further away from the original DPoS protocol and much closer to PoS protocols such as Ethereum 2.0, Cardano or Cosmos.
- Since the launch of Lisk in 2016, the blockchain industry has evolved a lot and “validators” and “staking” have become the industry standard. In fact, even our own community already frequently uses the terms “validators” and “staking” instead of “delegates” and “voting”. We therefore think that it is much better to adapt to the industry standard, which will also improve accessibility and simplify onboarding of new users.