Refereed Delegation of Computation (RDoC)

Most blockchains require a majority of their nodes to process every computation, which is extremely inefficient and limits computational scalability. Also, interoperability projects are often using consensus nodes to verify and execute transactions between different chains. Both of these practices use distributed consensus unnecessarily. Instead, other proof mechanisms can be used that add much less overhead and provide more security at a lower cost.

RDoC is the proof mechanism of the Coinweb Protocol that enables any participant in our network to verify if the information is valid or not. With RDoC, we only require one honest node. RDoC is also the mechanism that proves information between blockchains. Using RDoC, Coinweb can move much more of the verification out of the blockchain and let the thin clients (phones, dApp front-ends etc.) handle it on their own. We are the only protocol using this in the blockchain ecosystem to date.

The sequence diagram below (simplified) shows how the RDoC protocol works. The key is that the thin client can verify the computational proofs provided by the nodes, and eventually execute the disputed step on its own. RDoC effectively moves the proof computations out of the expensive L1 execution environment to instead be executed on the clients themselves. This removes a lot of overhead but also opens up very interesting use cases where verification of off-chain data is required.

To read more about how RDoC and Coinweb compares to solutions like rollups, read here

You can find the original RDoC whitepaper at: here