How Massa is solving blockchain trilemma with novel approach - part 3: Security

This is a conclusion to my series regarding Massa's solution to blockchain trilemma. I invite you to read part one about Scalability and part two about Decentralization to have a comprehensive understanding.

Massa is a decentralized platform that enables the creation of smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps). As with any decentralized system, security is a critical issue that must be addressed to ensure the integrity of the platform. Massa uses a combination of cryptographic algorithms and consensus mechanisms to secure its network and protect its users from potential attacks.

One of the key security features of Ethereum is its consensus mechanism, called Proof-Of-Stake (PoS). Nodes who want to participate in the block creation lottery will have to stake “rolls” that they buy with Massa coins. If they try to cheat by creating fake blocks or multiple blocks on the same slot, their stake will be taken away from them (slashing) and they would suffer the loss. Every 0.5s, a new slot becomes active to receive a new block of transactions. The mechanism to pick a node to build that block is randomized. Nodes are elected from a distribution pool where addresses are weighted by the amount of stake they hold.

If any malicious actor will try to disrupt the network, they will need to control over 45% of the network, which is highly unlikely due to Massa’s massive decentralization. The brilliant aspect of PoS is that if somehow they manage to aggregate more than half of the network nodes then the loose the incentive to do so since they hold the largest amount of Massa tokens and therefore they would only hurt themselves the most.

Massa also uses public key cryptography to secure transactions. Every user on the network has a unique public key that is used to identify them and a private key that is used to sign transactions. This helps to ensure that transactions are secure and cannot be altered once they have been processed. The address of an account is simply the hash of its public key.

Another element is smart-contract security: smart-contracts on Massa are executed on the blockchain and are deterministic and immutable: they can be used to enforce the terms of an agreement and to ensure that transactions are processed in a secure and transparent manner. The results of finished transactions are stored in a ledger and cannot be tampered.

One of Massa’s features that I particularly like is Read-only Execute and Call Smart Contract – it allows to simulate smart-contract execution as per normal, and read it’s effects, but without propagating them into a block.

To sum up Massa network provides cutting-edge security on several levels: consensus, cryptography and smart-contracts execution, all while providing decentralization and scalability. All this makes Massa a perfect platform for building decentralized applications.