The EBSI Production-Grade Network has reached the 15 validator nodes milestone
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In a joint effort with the European Commission, EUROPEUM-EDIC and EBSI-NE, the EBSI Production-Grade network has reached the milestone of onboarding 15 Validator Nodes, ensuring the security, resilience and reliability of the blockchain for its go-live.
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A critical component of bootstrapping a Production blockchain network, based on a Proof of Authority consensus, is the establishment of robust node network and rely on trusted, stable and secure validators. Thanks to the joint effort of the European Commission, EUROPEUM-EDIC and EBSI-NE, EBSI has reached the most important milestone for the Production-Grade environment: having 15 validator nodes. This represents the adequate number of nodes required to ensure the network's security, optimal performance, and robustness, as demonstrated through performance evaluations and the fault tolerance capabilities of the consensus algorithm.
All 15 validators are operational and stable. Synchronisation is seamlessly implemented at the blockchain protocol layer, with accurate reporting of the monitored metrics in real-time. Furthermore, the nodes are interconnected using a secure peer-to-peer mesh network, with access control mechanisms enforced exclusively for authorised entities.
To join the EBSI Production-Grade network, nodes must be endorsed by EUROPEUM-EDIC, ensuring the administrative and political support of its Member States. The nodes in the Production-Grade network today were endorsed for onboarding by the current EBSI governance structure. Ongoing efforts aim to onboard additional nodes from other Member States, with some already initiating internal procedures to deploy their nodes in the coming weeks. Onboarding new validator and/or regular nodes onto the Production-Grade environment will further enhance the performance, distribution and coverage of the EBSI services and prepare the initiative to reach its full potential by underpinning a large number of digital cross-border public services.
Over the past months, 11 voting rounds have been conducted to upvote or downvote validator nodes. Every voting round is done in a transparent way using the new Quorum Byzantine Fault Tolerant (QBFT) Validators Smart Contract, so that only existing validators can perform votes. The QBFT consensus allows for a virtually unlimited number of validators (better scalability), has a better performance compared to the previous Istanbul Byzantine Fault Tolerant (IBFTv2) consensus, and offers the possibility of hosting multiple blockchain clients in the same network.
In preparation for the full security implementation of the Production-Grade network the following parallel actions are in progress:
- Continued onboarding of new validators and/or regular nodes
- Validation that each node put in place the advanced security measures, required in the Node Operators Operational Book (NOOB)
- Monitoring of stability, compliance and performance of each node in the network
- Initiation of additional voting rounds for upvoting or downvoting the validators
- Regular software maintenance to keep all the EBSI components up to date with all improvements and security fixes
When the abovementioned actions are finished, and the EUROPEUM-EDIC is ready to launch the production network, several activities will be necessary to do so. Among these, the electronic ledger will be restarted and will include in the genesis file the current set of validators, deploy smart contracts that have undergone the security audit, confirm that each node operator meets the required security measures, and others.
The 15 validator nodes milestone is a result of hard work, demonstrating collective commitment to keep pushing EBSI towards the Production network and allowing different services built on it to go live. Now, with the transition to EUROPEUM-EDIC still under way, the new EBSI governance needs to be put in place to finalise the transition.
For more information on the real-time status of the Production-Grade environment, you can check the EBSI Network Map.
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