DPOS was first presented in 2013 and used in the BitShares project, in which users vote as validators of the production of blocks and once done, and the block is produced , the validators receive their rewards which in their turn may distribute a part of it to the voters .
DPOS is based on the consensus mechanism where validators verify block transactions and their power comes from the amount of tokens they have staked on the blockchain so there’s no need to mine and solve complexe mathematical equations that require very high requirements and energy consumption !
Nevertheless Not everyone have the ability to vote , in other words, the users of the network elect delegates over and over again, who will do the validation of blocks .
In order to vote for his favorite delegate, the user has to stake a given number of tokens in the pool, and this is not complicated at all since the users does not have to move their tokens to a certain wallet in the process of staking but just click on a provided service that will do the task of staking to the pool .
Eventually , the delegates are by far one of the most important factors to the consistency of the blockchain since they are responsible of ensuring the accuracy of the transactions and ofc they are rewarded accordingly to the correctness of their validations .
DPOS presents many key pros such as being based on reputation where delegates are elected through democratic process which aggregate the reliability and motivate the users to trust more in the project .
its also fast, since its not an open number of delegates, but the algorithm chooses how many delegates are needed for the validation of this transaction so it passes through an optimal time .
Additionally , its Scalable or in other terms it requires minimal Hardware since it does not rely neither on mining and resolving equations , nor on a hashing power , in fact its all about staking coins .
it also gives value to voting power and ensure that the delegates are trustworthy otherwise they will be driven out the blockchain .
Although it has many pros, it still presents many cons since there are many malicious token holders based on the fact that there are not thousand of delegates, it presents a 51% risk of attack, or lets call it this way, 51% of delegates can take the decision that they wish ! And we do all know that those types of attacks can easily be planned on these blockchains since theres a small number of delegates, which is usually between 20 and 100 .
Lets not forget to cite it’s Low decentralisation that translates in 26+ % of the total coin supply owned by the internals , whom can take on the election of delegates whenever its 30 delegates or less .
And finally since it does run only on votes, the community has to be active and vote delegates continuously otherwise it will fall all together .
DPoS give the community the ability to contribute to a blockchain even with small amounts of money, no need for mining gears and whatsoever however its not anyway near perfect since it lacks decentralisation which is the main reason of the existence of blockchain .
