The high energy consumption as a result of Bitcoin mining is no news as the issue is a thing of concern to the entire globe. In this premise, IOG, Cardano’s research and development company has put this into consideration and make a thorough research on how to get reduced the rate at which the energy is being consumed in the course of undergoing proof-of-work.
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IOG Introduces Ofelimos
It is good to know that the IOG came up with a protocol to reduce the energy waste of Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. The protocol is named Ofelimos and it was introduced at the Cryptology conference by members of the IOG research team. According to the IOG, the research was jointly carried out by some of its members, including Matthias Fitzi, Aggelos Kiayas, Giorgios Panagiotakos, and Alexander Russel.
The IOG stated:
“Today, at the leading international cryptology conference, Crypto, Input Output Global, Inc (IOG) introduces Ofelimos, a novel PoUW-based blockchain protocol whose consensus mechanism simultaneously realizes a decentralized optimization-problem solver,”
Aims of Ofelimos as stated by IOG.
- It aims to convert Proof-of-Work into Proof-of-Useful Work (PoUW) by solving the problem of energy efficiency.
- It will also redirect the computational work to maintain blockchain security. This is required by PoW to solve the other real-world problems
- Alongside redirecting, it aims to repurpose PoW computational efforts, including optimizing company logistics and event schedules.
- Finally, it aims to fight fraudulent miners’ behaviour to direct the system to pose easily solvable problems or problems that have already been solved.
Conclusively, “Ofelimos is only a first step towards provably secure and useful PoUW. Whereas the current work readily gives provable security for levels of high corruption, more research is still needed on the algorithmic side to provide suitable classes of optimization problems for which high usefulness can be provably demonstrated,”