Has the consensus mechanism that Vitalik has high hopes for already had successful cases?

Recently, Paradigm research partner Dan Robinson said on Twitter: It turns out that it is impossible to have a secure POW blockchain without blockchain rewards, and launched a vote on "How would you prefer Bitcoin to change?". Subsequently, many KOLs interacted with each other, among which Vitalik Buterin's views received the most widespread support, and he expressed high hopes for the hybrid mechanism of POW+POS. A single stone stirred up a thousand waves, which triggered heated discussions in many communities about the "best consensus mechanism"...

The Soul of Encryption
Where is the best consensus mechanism?

In recent years, as the most important infrastructure in the crypto industry, the design and development of public chains have been valued by everyone. It is no exaggeration to say that the value of crypto assets comes from "consensus", and the consensus mechanism is the "soul" that ensures consensus.
The background of the question raised by the Paradigm research partner mentioned at the beginning is precisely that Bitcoin has experienced several halvings, and now the block reward has dropped to 6.25BTC. As the main incentive for proof of work, the decreasing block rewards in the future may cause serious security issues, which is also what many people have been worried about for many years. The solution proposed by Vitalik "POW+POS hybrid consensus mechanism" has actually been innovatively used in some projects since 2013-2015, as he said on Twitter. POW + POS > 1 means that this hybrid consensus mechanism makes 51% attacks more difficult.
When it comes to the POW+POS hybrid consensus mechanism, the most successful one is undoubtedly Decred, which once entered the TOP30 in market value. Its allocation mechanism is classic. After a new block is generated through proof of work (PoW), the block producer receives 60% of the reward, and then enters the voting stage of the POS consensus. Holders are allowed to participate in the voting freely and receive 30% of the rewards allocated by the system. The remaining 10% goes into the community treasury and is decided by the community.
Decred has many advantages that attracted many community members, but also many disadvantages that laid the groundwork for its subsequent evolution:

1. Main advantages of Decred

a. Solved many problems left over from Bitcoin history
Decred's unique consensus mechanism and distribution mechanism not only improves the efficiency of block production, but also ensures security. The monetary rewards reserved for developers guarantee the development support of the software itself, and the voting system ensures that each decision will not be made by a few people. This allows Decred to form an efficient and harmonious community composed of block producers, holders, and developers.

b. Effectively avoid the problem of "mining tyrants" <br/>Through the POS rewards that decrease over time, just like constantly cutting a cake, the remaining cake becomes more and more scarce. At the same time, the distribution of POS holders + 10% DAO treasury eliminates the phenomenon of "mining tyrants" dominating everything, forming a balanced constraint of the separation of powers. This distribution mechanism brings natural anti-inflation and anti-depreciation capabilities.

2. Main problems and contradictions of Decred

a. The unfair phenomenon of resource monopolists winning without doing anything <br/>Under Decred's high-proportion distribution mechanism, block producers only need to continuously put their rewards into POS for staking, and it is inevitable that people or institutions will appear one after another as both large Holders and large computing power users. As time goes by, these community members will accumulate more and more "chips" that influence the entire system, which is equivalent to returning to the era of "mining tyrants".

b. The Decred project team gradually began to do nothing, and the community was dissatisfied. <br/>A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The Decred project team gradually began to take a more relaxed approach, and their development efficiency and enthusiasm gradually declined. Instead of regular basic upgrades and bug fixes, urgent work was repeatedly delayed, and community activity became increasingly low. As a result, Decred’s competitiveness gradually failed to keep up with many “enthusiastic” new-generation projects, and as its market value fell to the edge of the TOP100, more and more community veterans complained.

Best Practices of POW+POS Hybrid Consensus Mechanism
Decred is evolving: Decred-Next

Many community backbones and core developers who have participated in the creation of Decred and have made contributions in the fields of technology and operations still have ideals . They feel sorry for the projects and communities that originally had all the advantages but continued to decline and fall behind, and want to pass on the original intention and vision of the Decred community. So, this group of people, together with developers from all over the world, started a new journey. Decred evolved and forked, and Decred-Next is here:

1. Inherit and optimize excellent consensus mechanism and allocation model
Decred-Next is still a hybrid mechanism of POW+POS. Blocks are generated through the POW mechanism and then verified by the POS mechanism. However, the difference is that only blocks that pass the verification can become legal. The original consensus mechanism of POW package accounting + POS voting decision-making is created. The optimized POW+POS consensus mechanism effectively solves the problem of computing power monopoly, realizes complete decentralization, and perfectly solves the governance mechanism problem of decentralized projects.

2. Keep pace with the times and move towards Web3.0 and the Metaverse . With the strong hybrid consensus mechanism strongly recommended by Vitalik as the foundation, Decred-Next, a public chain that continues to be the best practice of the POW+POS hybrid consensus mechanism, has set its sights on the blue ocean markets of encrypted applications such as Web3.0 and the Metaverse, which are recognized as representing the future. It provides DApps with safe and reliable technical solutions and community support, and becomes a public chain with more potential and value.

According to the roadmap released by the Decred-Next community, Decred-Next will launch a series of incentive programs specifically for EVM project compatibility driven by a hybrid consensus mechanism and a very attractive democratic community, encouraging Ethereum developers to port their DAPPs to the Decred-Next ecosystem. These ported contents can quickly improve the ecological richness of Decred-Next, and at the same time bring very high user traffic and create topic popularity for the development of DCRN. It can be expected that in the near future, not only will there be many GameFis on Decred-Next, but users can even develop their own NFTs.

3. New communities, fresh blood
The Decred-Next fork not only inherited the technical advantages of the project, but also attracted many like-minded people who recognized the original vision of encryption. In addition to the original community members, some people in the Bitcoin community who were worried about security issues caused by the reduction of blockchain rewards also joined in and actively participated in community co-construction, and fresh blood gradually flowed in.  

summary

In the long history of the crypto industry, many new stars of the community have risen brilliantly and then faded away, just like the Decred and EOS communities. Each vivid case is extremely regrettable. They could have done better, but human nature is such that some people who only maintain a "three-minute enthusiasm" just come and fall asleep and have never been awakened. However, it is something worthy of recognition that the latecomers pick up the treasures left by their predecessors and innovate. What will the future of Decred-Next, a fork initiated by the original community activists, look like? Time will tell.