The KIRA network's permissioned governance system is the foundation of all its operations. It is specifically designed to address the fundamental limitations of permissionless systems that rely on assumptions about the rationality of its participants which is fundamentally insecure. In an open, permissionless system, it is impossible to guarantee that all participants will be either Byzantine or rational: A rational attacker can always find ways to profit from breaking the assumptions of the system*, even if their behavior appears irrational in the context of the system itself, which makes it challenging to ensure the security of the system. And this is even more true as we shift towards a multi-chain “Internet of Blockchains” paradigm. To overcome this, on top of its in-house Multi-Bonded Proof of Stake mechanism which allows to use multiple digital assets as staking collateral, KIRA has implemented a permissioned system where Consensus nodes and participants must be granted permission to join the network and participate in governance.
The KIRA governance system utilizes a combination of Roles & Permissions to create a multi-layered governance structure that enables a diverse range of members, a.k.a Councilors, to participate and contribute to the network's decision-making processes. This governance structure is modular and can be tailored to fit specific network conditions and requirements. For example, a multicameral system can be created where subsets of councilors specialize in creating and voting on specific subsets of proposals. This can be useful in scenarios where certain proposals require more expertise or specialized knowledge. Alternatively, a separation of power through checks and balances can be implemented, preventing a single governance branch from achieving a privileged position. This can be useful in scenarios where there is a risk of collusion or centralization. Overall, the KIRA governance system is designed to be flexible and adaptable, allowing it to constantly improve its efficiency and decentralization without relying on factors such as wealth or stake distribution. This makes it an effective tool for ensuring that network actors are motivated and aligned towards common goals, which is crucial for achieving consensus within the network while avoiding the potential pitfalls of permissionless systems. By allowing careful selection and monitoring of its participants, KIRA network is able to maintain a strong and secure network that is well-suited for building decentralized applications.
* For instance, a malicious actor may try setting up a honey pot on a foreign blockchain to steal tokens and use them to participate in governance or deploy new consensus nodes to exploit the network.
INTERX & Tendermint consensus node set’s practical limit
Tendermint uses a flavor of consensus protocol called Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) which has a communication complexity of O(n²). This means that as the number of consensus nodes increases, the amount of network communication required to obtain a supermajority approval during all voting phases of the protocol in order to finalize blocks will increase quadratically. This can cause non-negligible overhead and slow down the time it takes for blocks to be finalized. Therefore, there is a practical limit to how decentralized a blockchain with PBFT-based consensus can be. Most Tendermint-based blockchains have set thresholds between 100 and 150 nodes to strike a balance between time to finality and decentralization. To mitigate the communication overhead, Tendermint allows consensus nodes to configure bounds on the number of peers they can be connected with. However, it does not provide an efficient method for network discovery, which can lead to multiple latency problems as the consensus node set increases.
For this reason, KIRA has developed INTERX, a middleware that is run by all consensus nodes. INTERX optimizes network discovery by keeping track of the connection status of each node. This makes it possible to increase the practical limit of the node set. Additionally, INTERX is a decentralized API that allows users to query KIRA's state without having to depend on third-party service providers like Infura. This also makes it easy to maintain frontend applications.