Valour Chain

Bringing Community back to Crypto

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NOTE: This is still in early development. The below details may change at any time.

What is Valour Chain?

In order to increase throughput, manage bad actors, and comply with regulations, many cryptocurrencies are moving towards centralization. This is a worrying trend as it goes against the very ethos of cryptocurrencies. Valour Chain is a project that aims to bring back the community aspect of cryptocurrencies. It is a decentralized, community-driven cryptocurrency that is built on its own blockchain.

Why a new blockchain?

The issues modern cryptocurrencies face are due to inherent flaws in the design of their core blockchains. Building on top of them would not solve these problems. Everyone knows the downsides of POW chains - high energy consumption, centralization of mining power, and slow transaction speeds. POS chains are not much better - they are still centralized and have scalability issues. Specifically, rewarding the rich and punishing the poor. Valour Chain is built from the ground up to mitigate these issues where possible.

What makes Valour Chain different?

Valour uses an enhances "FPOS" (Fair Proof of Stake) consensus algorithm. This algorithm is designed to be fairer than traditional POS algorithms. It is designed to reward users based on their contribution to the network, rather than the amount of coins they hold. This is done by using a combination of a user's stake and their activity on the network. This ensures that the network is not controlled by a small group of wealthy users. Valour Chain also implements changes that reduce bad actions like network spam while promoting a low-to-no-fee and simple to use and develop platform for the average user.

Technical Features

Fair Proof of Stake (FPOS)

The first two criteria for rewards are:

• Holding coins in their wallet (this is the stake)
• Length of time a node has been active (older nodes are rewarded more)

This may sound similar to traditional POS, but using some basic mathematics, we can do better. These factors are scaled logarithmically to ensure that the network is not controlled by a small group of wealthy users. This is done by using the following formulae:

Reward Base

$$ R = B \cdot \frac{W_v}{\sum W_v} $$

R: Reward
B: Block reward
Wv: Weight of Validator
Sum(Wv): Sum of all Validator weights participating in the transaction

Weight of Validator

$$ W_v = \left( \frac{\log(1 + T_v)}{\log(1 + T_{\text{max}})} \cdot \log(1 + t_v) \right) + \left( \frac{\log(1 + K_v)}{\log(1 + K_{\text{max}})} \cdot \log(1 + k_v) \right) * S $$

Tv: Validator's staking time.
Tmax: Maximum staking time in the network.
tv: Validator's specific time for this transaction.
Kv: Validator's staked tokens.
Kmax: Maximum tokens staked in the network.
Kv: Validator's specific tokens used for this transaction.
S: Reward Multiplier for using HTTPS 

There is an additional 3x weight multiplier for nodes electing to perform transactions over HTTPS. Not only does this help protect the network via built-in encryption, but this requires the nodes to have a domain. This greatly reduces the ability for bad actors

Fee Scaling

The Valour Chain, for most purposes, is a no-fee chain. Common transactions will not incur a fee. Fees are calculated based on the amount of traffic generated by a particular wallet in a slice of time. For example, a wallet which sends 10 transactions a day may have 0% fees, while a wallet sending 100 transactions per second may incur a 0.1% fee. This promotes transaction efficiency and reduces network spam.

Low Barrier to Entry

Most cryptocurrencies are developed using terse code designed for experts in programming languages that harbor a high barrier to entry like C++, and low-level networking protocols like TCP. While using such efficient languages increases network throughput, we believe that if the source code of a chain cannot be understood easily, it centralizes the developer experience to a subset of experts. Valour Chain is built on C#, an easy and flexible language, and uses common HTTP/S and Websocket communication methods which make it easy for anyone to contribute to the project.