Bitcoin-NG and Cuckoo Cycle Proof of Work
To date, the Nakamoto consensus is the most tested way to secure the entries in a distributed ledger.
However, due to its design?—?waiting for the next block to be mined?—?scalability is limited.
Aeternity uses Bitcoin-NG to improve on-chain scalability. Whenever a block is mined, a leader gets elected.
That leader is allowed to issue micro-blocks until the next block is mined. This improves on-chain transaction speed compared to Bitcoin to ~6000 transactions per minute without compromising the well tested and proven design of Nakamoto Consensus.
Aeternity uses the efficient Cuckoo Cycle, the first graph-theoretic Proof of Work algorithm, and the most memory bound, with instant verification.
Its large memory requirements make single-chip ASICs economically infeasible, which improves mining decentralization.