[ANN][HER]Herdius - A Decentralized Exchange Network For Crypto Assets

Herdius - A Decentralized Exchange NetworkWhy Herdius?

The future of the decentralized web is dependent on the next generation of decentralized financial infrastructure. In order to sustain future growth and facilitate the influx of new members to the blockchain ecosystem, it’s important to create a financial base layer that is capable of handling such influx. For the ecosystem to thrive, the use of cryptocurrencies and tokens must become more user-friendly by a considerable margin. Present day financial blockchain architectures still suffer from several shortcomings that hold back a broad mainstream adoption, most notably long transaction confirmation times, little scalability, and a lack of decentralization and liquidity.Herdius vision is to considerably lower the barrier of entry to the token economy by offering a superior experience to institutional and end users alike. To that end, we aim to introduce an innovative and robust blockchain architecture that addresses the above issues. Our goal is to design a highly performant and scalable transaction and exchange infrastructure which enables seamless interoperability between different blockchains. These are critical conditions for adoption by many service providers and present a significant user experience improvement.The possibilities that arise from this are endless. We envision a world where you can instantly take a loan, sign up for an insurance, or access the entire dApp world services - all with just your identity on the Herdius chain. And since the Herdius core technology is intended as an open-source platform, we believe that many developers will consider building the next generation of decentralized apps on top of the Herdius chain.

What is Herdius?

Herdius is a decentralized exchange network. The best way to think about Herdius is as a new transaction layer in the cryptocurrency space: Herdius will sit between the users and the root blockchains of all relevant cryptocurrencies (or tokens). In blockchain terminology, Herdius is essentially a sidechain. A highly performant and scalable sidechain, that is. This way, Herdius can enable fast and seamless cryptocurrency transactions and peer-to-peer trading — even if the original chain is subject to long confirmation times. By establishing Herdius as the transaction layer for crypto assets, the underlying root chains could approach development at their own pace while Herdius would take care of the user experience.

How does it work?

As we explain in our technical paper (PDF), Herdius will be powered by a native proof-of-stake blockchain with several innovative features. Most notably, we are looking to introduce a new block architecture which we dubbed Blocks-of-Blocks (BoB). Without getting too technical here: BoB blocks are “stretchable” as they can contain so-called child blocks. This enables parallelized block validation — which goes a long way when high transaction volumes need to be handled. But that’s only one of many interesting features under Herdius’ hood. As outlined in our technical paper, Herdius introduces hallmark storage and payment highways to its chain in order to further increase scalability.

The HER Token

UtilityThe HER token will be the staking currency on the Herdius blockchain. Hence, it allows any holder of HER to become a validator (similar to miners in Bitcoin) in the Herdius network. For their services, validators earn a share of the transaction fees and block rewards. Also, users will be able to pay transaction fees in HER at a lower rate in comparison to fees paid in other cryptocurrencies.ValueHER is designed to be economically relative to transaction volume inside the Herdius network. All staked validator nodes will be entitled to a share of total transaction fees (proportional to their stake's