Nodes

Nodes The RowBlock network consists of two types of nodes; authority-nodes and non-authority nodes. All members of the RowBlock consortium have to commit to run one authority-node, and hence build together the essence of the RowBlock infrastructure. Thereby it is guaranteed that all authority-nodes of the network are distributed throughout various research organizations around the world. Authority-nodes carry out the computational activities in the network to validate and store blocks and transactions of the distributed ledger of the RowBlock network. All authority-nodes in the RowBlock network are considered equal and use the same consensus protocol to remain consistent. The hardware requirements for running an authority-node in the RowBlock pilot phase are relatively low (1CPU, 1GB memory and about 4GB of hard drive capacity), during this phase only the transactions are stored on the RowBlock blockchain, but not the data itself. Non-authority nodes communicate with the network. Every entity can run a non-authority node and connect it to the RowBlock network, like a startup running an application on RowBlock. With the growing number of consortium members and the corresponding growth of authority-nodes and non-authority nodes in the network, the capacity and security of the RowBlock will grow.