Echelon

Introduction

Echelon is a high-performance, scalable, EVM-compatible, Cosmos-compatible, and secure smart-contract platform.

Echelon’s mainnet deployment—echelon_3000-3—is built on Tendermint’s BFT consensus mechanism and Cosmos SDK. Echelon is a leaderless, asynchronous, and byzantine fault-tolerant Layer 1 blockchain protocol, network, and interoperable blockchain.

Tendermint enables Echelon to deliver fast EVM transaction speeds, low transaction costs, and deterministic finality. This is achieved while remaining permissionless, decentralized, and open-source.

Why Echelon?

The birth of Bitcoin in 2009 represented a big step forward in technology and a further move towards a more efficient society. However, Bitcoin was not built to scale, and its consensus mechanism—the engine that powers the blockchain—is limited by design.

Current solutions make trade-offs between four components: scalability, security, sustainability, and decentralization.

Bitcoin for example focuses on decentralization and security, which makes it less suited for any kind of transaction that requires speed and fast confirmation, like day-to-day payments, data transfer, asset trading or other transactions consumers and businesses rely on in everyday life.

Especially the legacy financial system, from the processes that happen in the back-end to consumer-facing solutions, requires high throughput and fast finality. Decentralizing these services at scale, while providing bank-grade security represents a challenge for the whole blockchain industry.

Echelon tackles the problem at the core: its high speed and decentralized consensus mechanism, allows digital assets to operate at unprecedented speed and delivers dramatic improvements over the current systems.

Unlike other solutions, Echelon does not sacrifice security and decentralization in favor of scalability or sustainability.

Indeed, the advantages brought by Echelon are not just pure performance; it has a modular architecture that allows for full customization of the blockchain for digital assets, with different characteristics tailored to their use-case. For example, a developer could launch a new algorithmic stablecoin that could then be voted into Echelon to be used as a native gas token in the network.

Echelon also offers exceptionally high levels of security by using a delegated Proof-Of-Stake protocol to secure the network with Validators and Delegators.

Echelon’s BFT consensus, called Tendermint, is capable of scaling to many nodes around the world in a permissionless, open environment, providing a good degree of decentralization. Echelon features Cosmos IBC technology (Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol) to interface with other popular Cosmos SDK based cryptocurrencies.

How does Echelon work?

1. Echelon is modular

Tendermint represents one layer, the consensus, of the blockchain technology stack and can be plugged into any distributed ledger. Tendermint powers Echelon, that uses the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and it’s compatible with Ethereum.

The modularity makes Echelon exceptionally flexible. Developers can port their existing Ethereum-based dApps on Echelon mainnet in a matter of minutes, substantially upgrading the performance and lowering the costs.

2. Echelon is secure and environmentally friendlyEchelon is secured by Delegated Proof-of-Stake. Unlike Proof-of-Work, used by Bitcoin and Ethereum, Proof-of-Stake prevents centralization and saves electricity.

Tendermint can provide institutional-grade security to distributed networks. Echelon offers absolute finality, which means that transactions can never be reverted like in networks with probabilistic finality.

The consensus mechanism can also scale to hundred of nodes, increasing decentralization and therefore security.

Lastly, Tendermint is leaderless. By removing leaders, security doesn’t rely on a small set of actors.

3. Echelon is open

• Open-Source

• Open-Participation

Echelon is open-source

Our teams are committed to creating building blocks for anyone to use and customize to their needs. We relentlessly aim for high transparency regarding our work. Based on these principles, our code is open-source and available on Github.

Echelon is open-participation

Echelon is permissionless. Anyone can run a node.

On Echelon’s Chain, a maxium number of 100 active validator nodes can participate in securing the network, as long as they keep a recommended amount of 1,000,000 ECH bonded.

If you own lower amounts of the token or you’re not an expert in running distributed systems, you can still participate in securing the network.

You can delegate any amount of ECH to a validator node, depending on their delegation specifications, and get rewarded.

Echelon Validators

View current active Echelon validators! https://app.ech.network/validators

Echelon is based on Tendermint, which relies on a set of validators that are responsible for committing new blocks in the blockchain. These validators participate in the consensus protocol by broadcasting votes which contain cryptographic signatures signed by each validator's private key.

Validator candidates can bond their own staking tokens and have the tokens "delegated", or staked, to them by token holders. ECH is Echelon's native token. At its onset, Echelon will launch with 100 validators. The validators are determined by who has the most stake delegated to them - the top 100 validator candidates with the most stake will become Echelon validators.

Validators and their delegators will earn Echelon as block provisions and tokens as transaction fees through execution of the Tendermint consensus protocol. Initially, transaction fees will be paid in Echelon, but in the future, any token in the Cosmos ecosystem will be valid as fee tender if it is whitelisted by governance. Note that validators can set commission on the fees their delegators receive as additional incentive.

If validators double sign, are frequently offline or do not participate in governance, their staked Echelon (including Echelon of users that delegated to them) can be slashed. The penalty depends on the severity of the violation.

We recommend that if you are setting up a validator on Echelon that you do so with a self-delegation or delegation of 1,000,000 ECH recommended. This ensures that you as a validator have sufficient fair voting power amongst the network of other validators and to ensure your validator is producing blocks actively and participating in full consensus of Echelon.