What is Petrachor (PTA)?

Petrachor is a secure and scalable digital asset platform, empowering a decentralized Internet experience. Its light-weight architecture can run from a phone, tablet, or desktop. Petrachor uses 100% original code for the Ariel Protocol; a resource efficient and censorship resistant Proof of Stake consensus. Millions of nodes can actively participate in mining, which eliminates the need for mining pools, and provides optimal security.

Petra (PTA) is the native unit of the Petrachor network. Petra can be used for:

* payments
* smart contract interactions
* mining for block rewards

How Does Petrachor's Consensus Work?

The Ariel Protocol is Petrachor's unique Proof of Stake v4 consensus. It provides probabilistic finality, meaning that there are no checkpoints - the chain with the most cumulative difficulty is the canonical chain. Miners can join and leave at any time, there is no minimum balance required, and all balances can be spent without restrictions. The consensus itself is very simple. Each miner creates a hash that includes a combination of:

* a timestamp that comes after the parent block timestamp, but not in the future
* the public key of the miner, and
* the stake modifier

Once a miner finds a hash meeting the required difficulty, they can sign the block with their BLS private key, and add transactions to the blockchain. Anyone running a full-node can easily verify that the block is valid by reproducing a hash of the 3 items listed above.
Unlike Proof of Work, which depends solely on computational power, our miners are rate limited to one hash per second, so that virtually any device can be utilized to mine and earn block rewards.

What Else Is Interesting About Petrachor?

The Boneh-Lynn-Shacham unique signature scheme is used for the core random beacon of Ariel. By also securing accounts with BLS, we pave the road towards future extensions, such as multisignatures, threshold signatures and aggregate signatures.

The elliptic curve used by our signature scheme is BLS12-381, a Barreto-Lynn-Scott curve. This curve was introduced in Sapling, the latest upgrade to the ZCash protocol, with the aim to improve efficiency and security while reducing memory intensivity.

How Many Petra Coins Are There?

Petrachor's network launched its mainnet on March 13, 2019 with 1 billion PTA created in the genesis block. The total supply of Petra increases at a rate of 3% per year. All Petra holders are eligible to receive block rewards. Unlike Proof of Work, Petrachor allows you to increase purchasing power over time, thanks to its fixed supply schedule.

What Problem is Petrachor Trying To Solve?

Petrachor solves the problem of scalability better than any other blockchain. All Petrachor nodes are equal peers, and require only generic hardware, with minimal Internet bandwidth. Petra (PTA) act as a catalyst to allow millions of individual nodes to secure the network. This unmatched scalability is what creates the foundation for the most inclusive and sustainable monetary system in the world.