Independent Layers
Blockchains require four key functions:
Execution: This involves processing transactions to update the state accurately, ensuring that only valid transactions—those resulting in correct state transitions—are executed.
Settlement: This provides an environment where execution layers can verify proofs, resolve fraud disputes, and interact with other execution layers.
Consensus: This function ensures agreement on the order of transactions across the network.
Data Availability (DA): This involves ensuring that transaction data is accessible, which is essential for execution, settlement, and consensus to function properly.
In this distributed system architecture:
Consensus Nodes:
Determine the order of transactions
Do not execute transactions themselves
Oversee other nodes' performance during normal operation
Arbitrate challenges to computation results
Execution Nodes:
Specialized for computation
Perform the actual transaction processing
Optimize for computing power
Verification Nodes:
Validate the results of computations
Distribute and parallelize the verification process
May be less powerful than Execution Nodes
No longer need to fully replicate the computation for checking(thanks to malicious operation being stopped at the execution nodes)
This architecture aims to increase overall system throughput by separating and specializing node functions. It delegates intensive computations to Execution Nodes while distributing the verification workload across multiple Verification Nodes.
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