Unlocking a Decentralized Future.
Posted by Nikhil Thawani on October 29, 2022
Unlocking a Decentralized Future by Incentivizing Publishers to Run Nodes, Layer one, and Layer two.
What is Gather online?
Gather is aiming to be a decentralized network where nodes are essentially run by the publishers that use our core product Gather Online. Publishers are onboarded with an incentive structure for their website or app to earn the $GTH by simply enabling a small tool on their website or app. End users are required to provide consent via an “opt-in” at the bottom of a web page, as users accept a tiny portion of their computer’s idle processing energy gets mined as a component of the consensus protocol, which is used to power the blockchain.
Gathers’ Layer One, and Our Unique Approach to Decentralization
Gathers’ vision is to create the world’s truly first decentralized ecosystem that is both affordable and scalable. We plan to achieve this by further incentivizing the publishers who are using Gather Online to run “Lite nodes” doing so gives Gather a unique advantage regarding node acquisition, As publishers would be incentivized to run nodes since they both:
A) Earn more for block validation and
B) Can participate in on-chain governance.
Keeping collateral relatively low and more importantly dynamic, which is linked to ecosystem growth, creates a very low barrier to adoption for publishers to opt-in. For comparison, if we take a conservative conversion rate of 10%, with 10,000 registered publishers (Publishers who have applied to have gather online integrated into their website) we would have 1000 nodes – this is already more than most of the existing Layer ones ( see comparison chart below ) Currently Gather has close to 1100 Publishers, and 100 or so Masternodes.
Let’s look at some data on what’s currently available on the market and what Gather plans to offer.
| Gather | Ethereum | Solana | Binance | Polygon | |
| Cost of Token Transfer | $0.000000147 0.000021 GTH |
$0.9269 0.000713 ETH | $0.00025 0.0000078 SOL | $0.1864 0.00075 BNB | $0.0018 0.0024 MATIC |
| Block Time (Seconds) | 13s (L2: 0.4s) | 12s | 0.4s | 3s | 2.3s |
| Cost per node setup ($) | Currently 1,000 GTH (Variable) | $42,000 (32 ETH) |
~$5000 | $2,500,000 (10,000 BNB) | – |
| Cost for ongoing monthly operations ($) | $5 | $50 | $320 | $25 | $120 |
| Number of nodes | 1200* | 432,68 | 2,000 | 21 | 100 |
| Hypothetical number of nodes | Unlimited | Limited due to cost | Limited due to cost | 21 | 100 |
*Figure represents the potential based on the current number of masternodes + publishers who have applied to have gather online integrated into their website.
In the above table, you can see how Gather will compare to other blockchain protocols in the future.
Future of Gather Online, Layer One Consensus Mechanism, and Layer Two.
Currently, Gathers’ Layer one, uses a heavily modified version of ETHash – which we aptly named GTHash – with the main difference being the removal of memory hardness – this is a feature that makes it “harder” to mine. We enacted this change so that end users of Gather online do not face issues or slowdowns. As it stands when visiting a website with Gather online, the memory consumption is less than that of a static ad. Don’t believe us? Just go to our Home page. We are also whitelisted by Avast antivirus as well.
However, even with this change, we have witnessed a dynamic change in the market – a move from Proof of work over to Proof of Stake and more carbon-neutral blockchains. We aim to move our consensus mechanism towards a system that rewards based on time spent, and not direct proof of work. There are multiple advantages such as:
1. While our current consensus is low electricity consumption the new time spent would exponentially lower.
2. Moving away from the stigma associated with Proof of work.
3. Being able to remove active Opt-in
When our layer two comes online, which is based on proof of stake and the master node network and focused on high throughout, we envision layer one and layer two having similar consensus mechanisms, however as both are in research and development we do not know yet what that final product(s) would look like. Either separate layers, with separate consensus, ie POS for layer two and time based for layer one, or a combination or merge of both layers.
*Edited – Nov 1, 2022.
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