Committee Building

The online Spark checkers are clustered into several committees.

At the start of each Spark round, the protocol groups the online Spark checkers into several committees. In each round, the protocol for assigning checkers to committees is random and deterministic. It uses Drand as the randomness beacon.

The members of each committee will go on to make the same retrieval checks as we will see in the subsequent steps of the protocol. The committee will then come to a consensus about the result of the retrieval.

There are a few reasons why the protocol randomly builds these different committees in each round:

1. By building the committees randomly, the protocol protects against one party controlling an entire committee.
2. More committees means more checks in each round. This prevents one Storage Provider from receiving too many of the same request in each round.
3. Committees reduce the ways in which checkers can act fraudulently. By coming to consensus on the result of the retrieval, checkers are held to account by the others in their committee.

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• Committee Building