3.10. Cheap to handle

Sequentia has a higher block frequency (slot time window) and a smaller blocksize than Bitcoin, leading to fast and inexpensive validation.

We can expect many financial assets, like stock tokens and, in general, securities, financial instruments, or utility tokens, to have a much lower level of liquidity than Bitcoin, which represents a monetary medium. Therefore, second-layer solutions like the Lightning Network will not always be viable for all assets issued on Sequentia. In blockchains designed for tokenization, like Sequentia, on-chain transfers of various kinds of assets will likely remain a widespread use case. It also follows that the timing of on-chain transactions needs to be set to meet the market demand for faster on-chain payments than what is currently possible for Bitcoin. At the same time, block frequency must not be so high as to provoke issues like overlapping time slots.

With long-term sustainability in mind, the block size limit could be set to 0.5 MB so that, in theory, with a blocktime of 1 minute, the size of the blockchain could not grow by more than 262.5 GB per year even when fully saturated. Furthermore, a pruning system based on checkpoints, possibly combined with utreexo technology (used to reduce the size of UTXOs), can dramatically reduce storage hardware requirements even further.

In the former case, checkpoints can decrease the initial blockchain download time (IBD) for users wanting to run a node with a fast-sync mode (analogous to Pierre Rochard’s idea (7) of a node launcher for Bitcoin) and discard (prune) the blockchain before a certain block height so that the space required on disk remains minimal.

Thanks to these optimizations, running a full node on an average personal computer will always be possible, fostering a more decentralized network.

Footnotes/p3.10

7. With Pierre Rochard’s idea of “node launcher” for rapid onboarding, node functionalities are ready in the first minutes after launching the software. The wallet uses BIP157 while the Bitcoin full node is syncing in the background. Once the Bitcoin full node is ready, BIP157 usage stops and the wallet starts relying on its own blockchain data.

https://twitter.com/pierre_rochard/status/1104758721824067588 https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/azrrc2/if_the_bip157_pull_request_gets_closed_too_then/ https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0157.mediawiki