IOST is a decentralized blockchain network based on a "proof of confidence" (PoB) consensus algorithm. The mission of the project was to build an online service architecture to meet the security and scalability requirements of a decentralized economy.

Build the infrastructure layer for the development and deployment of large-scale distributed applications (DApps) that require high-throughput processing.

Excessive commissions, invasion of privacy, fraud and censorship are common problems encountered in everyday interactions with centralized online service providers. Given these acknowledged centralization problems, since the launch of Bitcoin in 2008, a number of blockchain technologies have been developed to try to address them. Professional projects such as SteemIt, Bitshares and Syscoin, as well as multi-functional projects such as Ethereum and EOS, are some of the many examples. However, most of these attempts are either overly specialized in some applications or are hampered by low transaction throughput. Because of these flexibility and transaction throughput constraints, it's impossible for developers and businesses to bring large services like Facebook or Amazon to the blockchain, let alone more complex things like digital asset exchange. At the heart of the scalability issue lies the underlying design of these existing blockchain technologies -- their consensus protocols and blockchain architectures. Most existing blockchain technologies face two major challenges in the way they scale: a) each complete node must store the entire ledger to participate; B) Every participating node in the network is obligated to process every transaction. Because all participating nodes are essentially performing the same work, the system can handle no more than the number of transactions on a single node. In addition, the growth of blockchain scale increases the demand and cost of storage space, bandwidth, and computing resources for nodes to fully participate in the network. The ever-increasing cost of extraction is bound to make participation in the network the privilege of the few, leading us directly back to the problem of centralization.

The platform not only provides its users with a completely decentralized way to exchange online services and digital goods, but also enables developers to deploy large-scale DApps that can support a large number of users. Through a series of breakthrough innovations, such as efficient Distributed Sharding (" EDS ") and the trusted first consensus approach, the system is able to dramatically increase throughput while ensuring security.

EDS based on sharding technology. It is widely used in distributed systems and databases to achieve parallel transaction processing. Sharding is a technique that divides the entire IOS network into subspaces called shards, inspired by the classic "divide and conquer" principle of computer science. IOST can treat each fragment as a mini-network, running its own consensus protocol in parallel. Rather than having the entire network validate the same set of transactions, subsets of transactions can be processed simultaneously by different consensus groups. As a result, the throughput of the system can increase significantly even if the network size and transaction number grow rapidly. In addition, in order to ensure the uniformity of network partitioning, IOST designs an anti-bias distributed random protocol, which introduces unbiased transparent randomness into the sharding process. With EDS, IOS is also packaged in a very powerful library of technologies that enable the deployment of large scale DApps with high performance and flexibility. It allows developers to build a wide range of products: from rivals to traditional monopolies of online service providers to entirely new business models previously thought impossible. To be sure, running such services can be expensive when the IOS network is relatively small. However, as the number of nodes and resources in the network increases, the cost of running such a large-scale Dapp could decrease significantly. In addition, there are many benefits, including: network attack avoidance, high level of data security, and immutable attributes. During the development of IOS blockchain, IOST thoroughly examined all currently available solutions in order to learn from previous attempts.

IOST's consensus algorithm proof of credibility (" PoB ") includes a decentralized committee election process while retaining scalability advantages and resistance to censorship. IOST is designed to ensure a voting and committee formation process in which most nodes are eligible for blocks (not just the first few nodes), and the more votes the nodes have the higher probability of being allocated blocks. To this end, IOST does not use voting results as the sole factor in its selection. Instead, IOST introduced a points system called Servi to determine and rotate committee members.

1. Payment to service and goods providers. 2. Pay fees and commissions for running native smart contracts. 3. Process transactions and use shared resources such as storage space. 4. Pay as a reward for contributing network resources. 5. Exchange IOST network tokens issued by other third parties.

Compared with other public link projects, IOST mainly innovates and upgrades in the aspects of consensus mechanism and virtual machine. PoB can be simply understood as an improvement of DPoS, which can partially solve the serious problem of centralization of DPoS consensus mechanism. Compared to Ethereum VIRTUAL machine EVM, V8VM provides partial modularity, providing a more convenient development environment for developers. V8VM is also trying to address the high cost of running Ethereum smart contract code. V8VM uses JavaScript language, which is more convenient and easy to develop compared with EOS C.

As part of the IOST ecosystem, each user can earn IOST tokens by verifying transactions and contributing resources such as running smart contracts, providing storage space, and so on.

EOS and TORN used the DPoS consensus mechanism for expansion. Algorand Difinity use a single-chain system with a pure Pos mechanism. ETH2.0, Cosmos, and Polkadot support heterogeneous fragments for expansion. IOST uses the original PoB consensus mechanism for expansion.