Kaspa DAG vs Nano DAG: Validator Spread

Decentralized Proof-of-Work: Anyone with hardware can join the network as a miner/validator, securing the DAG. This matters for censorship resistance and long-term security akin to Bitcoin, but requires energy expenditure.

1,000+ public nodes across global data centers. The PoW model incentivizes a distributed, competitive mining ecosystem, which matters for resilience against regional outages and sybil attacks.

Delegated Proof-of-Stake (dPoS) variant: Users delegate voting weight to Representatives (validators). This matters for ultra-low energy consumption and instant finality, but concentrates validation power to elected nodes.

~100 Principal Representatives handle consensus. While any account can be a PR, voting weight concentration is a known challenge. This matters for efficiency and speed but presents a higher centralization risk compared to permissionless models.

Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus: Validators (miners) are anonymous and permissionless. Security scales with total network hashrate, currently ~400 PH/s. This creates a high-cost, Sybil-resistant barrier to attack, similar to Bitcoin. It's ideal for high-value, censorship-resistant settlement where economic finality is paramount.

GHOSTDAG protocol allows all valid blocks to coexist in a DAG. Miners reference multiple parent blocks, leading to high throughput (currently ~1 Block Per Second) without sacrificing security. The validation set is the entire global mining pool, ensuring no single entity controls transaction ordering.

Open Representative Voting (ORV): Uses a fixed, elected set of Principal Representatives. Users delegate their voting weight to these nodes. This model consumes negligible energy and enables sub-second transaction finality. It's optimal for low-value, high-volume micropayments where speed and eco-friendliness are critical.

Voting weight is sticky. The top 10 representatives often control >50% of the online voting weight, creating a quasi-permissioned validator set. While decentralized in theory, in practice, it risks vote consolidation and requires active user participation in delegation to maintain spread. This matters for protocols needing maximal, dynamic decentralization.

Stake-weighted, low-barrier participation: Voting power is delegated to Representatives (Reps) by account holders. This allows for thousands of lightweight Principal Representatives with minimal hardware, enabling broad geographic distribution. However, finality depends on the quorum of online voting weight, which can centralize around a few large exchanges or custodial services.

Feeless, low-resource consensus: The Open Representative Voting (ORV) model requires no mining or staking lock-up. This allows anyone with a Raspberry Pi and an internet connection to run a Principal Rep, promoting a diverse and globally distributed validator set focused on network health rather than financial reward extraction.

Mining-driven, hash-rate secured: Validators (miners) are spread according to the distribution of mining hardware and cheap energy. This aligns with Bitcoin's security model but inherits its centralization pressures from ASIC manufacturers and large mining pools. The k-cluster parameter in GHOSTDAG helps mitigate this by allowing for multiple block producers per second.

Costly-to-attack, Nakamoto Consensus-based: The spread of hashing power provides strong Sybil resistance. The protocol's security is directly tied to the total network hash rate, making a 51% attack expensive. Validator spread is thus a function of capital expenditure and operational efficiency, leading to a professionalized but potentially concentrated set of participants.