Saito Wiki is the public library of knowledge about Saito Consensus and the Saito network. It explains how the network works, the economic and theoretical principles behind its design, and the practical information needed to run a node or build applications. Everything here exists to make the architecture transparent: what the network is doing, why it works, and how the difficult problems are solved.
Why Saito Matters
Modern blockchains rely on economic designs that underfund the work needed to keep the network alive. In proof-of-work networks like Bitcoin, fees flow to miners who burn hashpower rather than the peer-to-peer nodes which run the network. In proof-of-stake networks like Ethereum, rewards accrue to capital holders regardless of whether they help collect the fees they are paid for their efforts. In both designs, the system pays the wrong actors for the wrong activities and hopes the network will scale anyway.
Saito fixes this by changing the form of work that the network measures and pays for -- cryptographic routing signatures are used to track the contribution of the nodes that do the critical work of servicing users and keeping fees flowing into the system. Those signatures are then leveraged to drive fees to the participants who collect them regardless of who produces the actual block. And with real economic activity suddenly determining who produces blocks and who gets paid, two things happen at once:
• scalability rises as nodes compete to maximize fee-throughout
• security rises as attacking the network gets more expensive
Abstractly, what Saito does is reverse an economic problem that is foundational to every self-provisioning network. Incentives to extract wealth elsewhere are here replaced with incentives to contribute fees. Competition is replaced with cooperation. And scale and security increase simultaneously instead of competing with each other. This is the foundation of Saito Consensus.
Why Saito is Intellectually Challenging
To understand Saito fully it is necessary to understand both economics and computer science at a reasonable high level. The reason for this is that many of the limits accepted in existing blockchain designs come from long-standing assumptions in computer science and economics which are not obvious to those without experience in the field. Classic impossibility results assume that identities are free to create, that cheating has no economic cost, that networks cannot differentiate honest traffic from adversarial traffic, and that systems cannot force participants to make real trade-offs that will result in all attackers being worse off in equilibrium. Under those assumptions, large decentralized networks must either be slow, wasteful, or reliant on trusted intermediaries.
Saito changes the economic structure in ways that undermine these impossibility results. It makes Sybil behavior expensive, imposes an asymmetrically-expensive cost on the actions attackers must take to undermine consensus, and penalizes malicious behavior that is unmeasurable in other networks. By changing the underlying economic constraints that attackers face, Saito moves outside the space in which existing impossibility results bind. The result is a permissionless network that rewards the work that matters, penalizes the work that threatens it, and remains scalable as demand grows.
This wiki exists to explain that architecture clearly and rigorously.
If you’re here to use the network you can skip directly to the live network or explore the applications running on Saito today. Be sure to also check out the new kinds of Smart NFTs that routing signatures create and the new kinds of functionality that they support.
If you want to run a node or building applications you can visit our node installationS instructions** checkout examples of the applications that others are building, and see our list of tutorials for help getting started or building more complicated applications using the Saito SDK.
If you want to understand the theory, our research section assumes familiarity with distributed systems, collective-action problems, and mechanism design. It explains how Saito Consensus works, how it relates to existing work in economics and computer science, as well as mathematical proofs of network robustness to sybil attacks and other technical problems previously considered unsolvable in the space.
Want to help? This wiki is a community-maintained knowledge base. We welcome assistance keeping our documentation updated, and improving the resources that exist here to help others understand why Saito matters. If you are interested in contributing to this wiki we have a page here on how to contribute.
Report a problem? Saito is an open network, the applications and transaction archives are often served locally from server caches. We strive to be a model for building systems that respect user privacy, but do not condone the distribution or sharing of illegal content. If you run into materials that are strictly illegal under US law, please see our takedown notice, which governs our process for disabling or removing access to content in our own archives.