FAQ overview | Tachyon Protocol

Tachyon Protocol

1. What is Protocol?

Data transmission stands for the communication among different devices. If we want to send some info to someone, how can the data know where to go and how to go? The communication protocol is the rules system. It allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any kind of variation of a physical quantity. It defines the format, the meaning and the time needed for the messages you can send to others. So the protocol is a set of rules dictating how we communicate with the resource on the other end of this network.

2. What is TCP/IP?

When a group of protocols designed to work together, they will become the protocol suite. The TCP/IP protocol suite which is commonly used now consists of many protocols that operate at one of the 4 layers. The protocol suite is named after two of the most common protocols — TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and IP (Internet Protocol). The four layers include Link layer, Internet layer, Transport layer and Application layer. Every layer contains different protocols.

3. What are the advantages of Tachyon Protocol over TCP/IP Protocol?

Tachyon Protocol uses decentralized structure, DHT and UDP to transform TCP/IP protocol, which improves the connection success rate to over 90% in complex environments, and its transmission speed can be increased by 200%~1000%.

Tachyon Protocol uses end-to-end combined encryption, protocol simulation and other innovative technologies to overlay the security layer for TCP/IP models, improve data transmission security, prevent data feature leakage, and improve difficulty for firewall/filter identification;

Tachyon Protocol uses concurrent multi-routing and multi-relay forwarding scheme similar to the Onion network to improve the difficulty of capturing and deciphering information.

Therefore, Tachyon Protocol has obvious advantages in terms of privacy, security and transmission speed with respect to TCP/IP Protocol. It can also fully comply with TCP/IP protocol through SDK and provide these benefits for it.

4. What is the relationship between Tachyon Protocol and blockchain?

As a decentralized Internet protocol, Tachyon Protocol relies on distributed node providers to provide traffic resources to users. In order to get the server scheduling and traffic transactions out of the centralized server and realize the decentralized network, the use of blockchain technology is crucial to Tachyon Protocol.

Tachyon Protocol releases IPX Token based on V SYSTEMS for authentication, transaction settlement, community governance, to ensure the normal operation of the entire ecology and establish a fair, transparent and efficient trading and reward mechanism.

IPX token will serve the purpose of identity verification. This is essential to the security of Tachyon Protocol Network, as without token for identity verification, the malicious nodes can easily monitor the traffic and undermine the security of the network.

IPX Token also ensures that the Tachyon founding team is not a central monopolist in the ecosystem, making the Tachyon network always driven by community participants, resulting in a more transparent and open operation with a longer life cycle.

IPX token is usable for both trading and store of value. IPX token enables the Tachyon market to operate by means of pre-session locking, instant checkout and session fee collection. Without a token, we cannot resolve Sybil and Eclipse attacks which would result in the whole network being rendered inoperable.

As an important part of incentive and coordination mechanism, Token is also crucial to the expansion of the network boundary and the development of Tachyon ecosystem. Without token, nodes are not incentivized to join the network, resulting in the inability to produce value for other business scenarios and the settlement.

5. With Tachyon, our data transfer speed can be 10x faster, how does it work?

The speed of the network transmission mainly depends on three factors: 1. the current network environment; 2. the transmission protocol used; 3. the transmission path

First, there are many influencing factors in the network environment that can cause the network connection failure, which will take a lot of time to re-establish the connection. For this reason, Tachyon Protocol can increase the connection success rate to 90% or above in the complex network environment by identifying the current network environment and selecting the available protocols.

Second, we all know that TCP is a reliable transmission protocol. It is generally used as the protocol of the transport layer. However, in order to maintain reliability, TCP protocol has made some compromises in terms of transmission speed. Tachyon Protocol uses UDP protocol instead of TCP for the primary transport protocol of transport layer, utilizes bandwidth-aware technology to maximize bandwidth utilization. In view of the nature of UDP, Tachyon also uses ACK management, FEC (Forward Error Correction) and other technical solutions to improve its reliability. Google's QUIC and IBM's Aspera are optimized at this level, and they have achieved great results.

Third, the transmission path has a great influence on the transmission speed, particularly in long-distance transmission scenarios. Tachyon combines the real-time delay, packet loss, and bandwidth information in the node to obtain the transmission efficiency between nodes in the routing path, select the appropriate transmission path, and maximize the transmission speed.

IPX Token

1. Is there any chance of increasing the supply?

In fact, the initial supply is 1 billion. In order to encourage more nodes to join Tachyon for network construction and community governance, and ensure the decentralization and self-development of the network, we will issue an additional 5% per year to motivate the Node Provider for a decade.

2. How to buy IPX token?

IPX Token has been listed on Bithumb and Bithumb Global! You can buy IPX token on these exchanges. The listing also opens the door for all supporters to participate in the development of the project and brings a great start to build up the circulation of IPX token to drive the whole Tachyon ecosystem.

3. What’s the purpose of staking?

To ensure the rewards are issued to the node providers that actually contribute to the network, the node providers must obtain enough IPX Token to become verified. Node providers are required to pay a security deposit in the amount of 200,000 IPX tokens after tokens are idle for a minimum of 7 days in order to complete the node verification. This is done in order to prevent the scenario where network is flooded by malicious or inactive nodes. This period of 7 days is called: “wind up period”, and it is set to align the interests of the network and the potential node provider. However, the speculative value of the IPX token may fluctuate while the tokens are locked in the smart contract. We’ve decided to have inflation based reward system of 5% per annum to encourage the nodes to keep providing the service to the network regardless of the speculative value of the token. The annual reward of 5%, along with mandatory lock-up phase, simulates the Proof of stake “staking” or “mining” found in some blockchain networks. This should help reduce the holding risk and opportunity cost of the operating node.

4. What is the maximum supply of IPX token?

5. Does the token have places available for immediate usage?

On Tachyon VPN, users will use IPX Token to pay for the service. Using IPX Token for purchasing Tachyon VPN will bring more vitality to the Tachyon Network. At the same time, we will also carry out Airdrop marketing activities in accordance with the specific market conditions. Besides, if users want to join the network with their idle bandwidth, they also need IPX tokens.

6. Who will distribute issued tokens?

The team has signed non-disclosure agreement with some parties involved, so we cannot share the information in the telegram group publicly at the moment. Once the partnership or investment is confirmed and ready to announce, we will share in our official channels.

7. Does your token have a restricted area/Whitelist?

The participation in token sales is prohibited by applicable law, decree, regulation, treaty, or administrative act (including without limitation the United States of America, Canada, New Zealand, People's Republic of China (but not including the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, and the territory of Taiwan), Thailand, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam).

Typical Inquiries

1. Why is the first product a decentralized VPN?

As a fundamental internet protocol, Tachyon Protocol can be used in many fields. Our team has focused on the online privacy & privacy problem over 5 years. And we think decentralized VPN is a good point to show what Tachyon Protocol can do. And the concept of Tachyon Protocol has been tested for a long time. The successful performance gives us the confidence to get a further step in decentralized VPN.

There are 900 million VPN users around the world. They have urgent needs for privacy protection, network security and freedom. Compared with traditional network protocols, Tachyon Protocol has obvious advantages in these areas. These features are very suitable for landing on VPN scenario;

Tachyon Protocol’s technology in internet protocols comes from mature products which have accumulated technical experience and channel influence in the VPN industry. We think this is the best choice;

Decentralized VPN is not a new concept but no one could really make it for now because the key problem is not solved. We all know Blockchain can bring real privacy & security to the VPN market, but how to combine these two to reach the perfect result? Our answer is Tachyon Protocol. Only improving the fundamental internet protocol, solving the key problem from the origin, can a decentralized VPN be realized. This is what makes Tachyon VPN different from other similar projects.

2. How will an everyday user of a VPN service will be able to access your service?

We will provide clients for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS and other systems, and the community will also launch their clients for users based on our open-source kernel.

3. Can a decentralized VPN replace the traditional VPN?

Well, it could be a trend. A centralized VPN has limited credibility in providing cybersecurity and privacy protection. If a real decentralized VPN can be realized, the replacement will happen for sure but there are still many problems to solve. That's what Tachyon Protocol focuses on.

4. Is the code for your project open source?

https://github.com/tachyon-protocol

We mainly use Golang for project development. Tachyon Vpn is a Decentralized VPN project, which is in an open source state.

Udw is a library of Golang, which is currently in the partly-open source state and will be fully open in the future;

PoC_Payment_Channel is the Payment channel demo for usability testing developed by Ethereum, which is also in open source state.

5. Have you ever done competitive products analysis?

Yes, we did market research and competitive product analysis for decentralized VPNs in the encryption industry. Currently, there are few mature direct competitors, and most of the projects are in its infancy. For example, Orchid Protocol has just released a pre-release version that only includes a VPN traffic analyzer and does not provide VPN services. Top Network's VPN service has no technical advantages in terms of security and privacy, and its progress has been slow. So did Mysterium.

As for the decentralized VPN market, Substratum is possibly the best-known crypto project working in this field. Unfortunately, there has been little progress in their work post ICO, and to make matters worse, the project got mired in controversy early this year. Similar blockchain projects like Skycoin and Maidsafe haven’t covered much ground either.

6. What are your advantages over competitive products?

Compared with them, the difference of Tachyon Protocol is that we optimize at the underlying communication protocol level, and combine the advantages of blockchain to improve privacy protection and network security. Most of the competitive products are simply related to blockchain, such as Orchid Protocol. After two years, they haven't launched actual products yet, and the majority of the white papers describe how to use the consensus similar to PoW to avoid user transaction cheating.

Tachyon Protocol's innovations are as follows:

Using PPPoIP, DHT and other mature distributed technologies to transform the TCP/IP model, using UDP as the transport protocol of the Transport Layer, thus making the transmission network stable. And the transmission efficiency has been greatly improved;

Using the multi-protocol adaptive infiltration technology that has been verified by 50 million users, to identify the network environment, select available protocols, and increase the network connection success rate in complex network environments to over 90%;

On the TCP/IP model, using end-to-end combined encryption, protocol simulation and other innovative technologies to disguise the transmission data as other types of data, such as disguising the IP package that sends an email as accessing Google's IP Package, improve the security of data transmission, prevent data feature leakage, and improve the difficulty of Firewall/Filter identification.

Using concurrent multi-routing scheme and multi-relay forwarding scheme similar to Onion network to improve the difficulty of capturing and deciphering information;

Providing an easy-to-implement SDK to open the Tachyon Protocol to other projects.

Tachyon Node Manager 2.0

1. What is the Node Manager 2.0?

Node Manager 2.0 is locally-deployed software built in the form of a web app. It is a powerful tool designed for all Node Providers to help create, manage nodes and join staking easily.

2. What's the difference among Node Manager 2.0 and IPXUS.com?

You can submit the wallet address, and stake IPX to obtain staking rewards on both of them.

Node Manager 2.0 is a management tool launched by Tachyon. You can easily create and manage your own servers as you wish, and get rewards based on the traffic in the market.

IPXUS.com is a platform created and operated by the Tachyon community. They use Node Manager 2.0 to create and manage servers and obtain rewards. At the same time, they lease the revenue rights of the server to community members by means of staking.Community members do not need to manage the server, only need to stake IPX to get rewards.

3. What's the difference among Node Manager 2.0 and Node Manager 1.0?

In Node Manager 2.0, you can create servers in batches, saving you the cost of repeatedly setting up the machine; auto-floating IP allow more vpn users to connect to your server, so that your rewards will rise up too; the server notice informs you of the server status, and promptly lets you know when a failure occurs; the cooperating cloud service providers are mainstream, so the server quality is guaranteed; if you encounter legal problems, we provide templates to assist users in handling matters.

In Node Manager 1.0, you can configure the server to join Tachyon Network and view the server status. You can set the permissions of the Tachyon key between public to private. The public key is displayed on the Tachyon official website, on which vpn users may see it and connect on Tachyon VPN; you can share the private key with your relatives or friends.

4. How to deploy Node Manager 2.0 on Windows?

Log into your server using SSH;

Press and hold Win+R at the same time, enter cmd to open the Command Prompt; or Click the "Start > Program Files > Accessories > Command Prompt" to open a Command Prompt session.

Type the following ssh syntax: ssh username@ip_address (e.g. ssh [email protected]) and Hit the Enter;

Note: Only supports Ubuntu 18.04 server now. We recommend that you choose a server from a major cloud service provider in an area with relatively loose cyber security, so as to reduce the trouble of dealing with infringement issues. For example, AWS and Google Cloud servers in Switzerland, Germany, Netherlands, Singapore, etc.

Run the following command line in the Command Prompt to configure the server. Please noted that only root users can deploy master;

curl https://tachyon.eco/install_node_manager.sh | bash && tyNodeManager deployMaster

Copy the URL at the terminal, open it in your browser, and you need to input Username and Password at the first time;

Save your Username and Password carefully.

5. How to deploy Node Manager 2.0 on macOS?

Log into your server using SSH;

Hit Command-Spacebar and type "Terminal" to launch the Terminal application. Terminal is also found in /Applications/Utilities/Directory;

Type the following ssh syntax: ssh username@ip_address (e.g. ssh [email protected]) and Hit the Return;

Type "yes" if you are prompted;

Type the password of the server to log into the server;

Run the following command line at the Terminal to configure the server. Please noted that only root users can deploy master;

curl https://tachyon.eco/install_node_manager.sh | bash && tyNodeManager deployMaster

Copy the URL at the terminal, open it in your browser, and you need to input Username and Password at the first time;

Save your Username and Password carefully.

6. How to deploy Node Manager 2.0 on Linux?

Log into your server using SSH;

Press Ctrl+Alt+T in Ubuntu, or press Alt+F2, type in gnome-terminal, and press enter.

Type the following ssh syntax: ssh username@ip_address (e.g. ssh [email protected]) and Hit the Return;

Type "yes" if you are prompted;

Type the password of the server to log into the server;

Run the following command line at the Terminal to configure the server. Please noted that only root users can deploy master;

curl https://tachyon.eco/install_node_manager.sh | bash && tyNodeManager deployMaster

Copy the URL at the terminal, open it in your browser, and you need to input Username and Password at the first time;

Save your Username and Password carefully.

7. How to stake IPX on Node Manager?

On the Calculator page:

Submit your wallet address with enough IPX balance.

Choose location, nodes number and days of staking. You can check the estimated rewards and ROI through the calculator on the right side. Click Confirm, you’ll stake successfully.

Click Add or Start Staking to start configuring servers on the Node list page.

On the Cloud service providers page:

Choose the cloud service provider you want to configure.

Input authentication information of a cloud service provider according to the guideline.

Choose the servers you want to create and manage.

Servers are created successfully, so you can manage the server, including stopping the server, sharing your Tachyon key, checking the rewards history, re-configuring the server, taking the server offline, and deleting the server.

8. Rules of Staking IPX and Configuring Server in Node Manager 2.0

Staking amount: No less than 20,000 IPX, no maximum limit. The more the staking amount, the more the number of servers that can be configured, the more rewards you get.

Conditions for success: The submitted wallet address balance is greater than 20,000 IPX. The number of configurable nodes is equal to the staking amount divided by 20,000. After providing the account permissions of Cloud Service Providers, you can select the corresponding number of servers to manage and check the rewards.

Behaviors that affect rewards: If you manually stop, go offline or delete nodes, you will lose rewards; If your configured server fails and cannot provide traffic for VPN users, you will lose rewards; If you reduce the balance of the submitted wallet address, the corresponding nodes will become inactive, and you will not be able to get this part of the rewards. We will send rewards based on the actual staking amounts and staking days.

Rewards distribution rules: In most cases, if you stake IPX on T day (UTC+9:00), staking rewards will soon start to accumulate at 0:00:00 on T+1 day (UTC+9:00) and begin to be distributed at 12:00:00 on T+2 day (UTC+9:00). If you stop staking between 0:00 to 24:00 on T+N day (UTC+9:00), your staking period is N-1 days and you will only receive staking rewards for the N-1 day period.

9. What is Auto-floating-IP?

Communicating with our VPN users, we found that IP addresses could be blocked in some countries, such as Iran, UAE, Turkmenistan, resulting in our users unable to connect successfully. Turning on auto-floating-ip means more users will connect to your server, which will bring more session rewards.

This function works like this:

Node Manager 2.0 will determine the number of servers offline based on the existing server uptime, the sessions provided to the user, the current server connections, etc.

Node Manager 2.0 launches new servers with the same number as offline servers in advance.

Once there are no users on certain servers, they will be completely offline.

Therefore, in this process, the server cost may be higher than expected. We recommend that you consider whether to enable this function and set the cycle based on the number and cost of your servers.

10. What is Task log?

In the process of server management, server creation, server online, and server offline are all tasks. Due to network uncertainty, the task may fail. Therefore, Node Manager 2.0 displays all tasks in the list, you can see the execution status of the task in this list.

11. What are Cloud service Providers?

Considering that cloud services are the mainstream trend at this stage, Tachyon has reached cooperation with mainstream cloud server providers AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean and UpCloud. Node Providers can choose the servers of these four service providers for staking and join Tachyon Network. We will release the Command line version later.

Tachyon will expand the types of servers managed by Node Managers 2.0 in two ways:

Tachyon will continue to be compatible with mainstream cloud service providers;

Tachyon will be compatible with its own local server, PC or Router in subsequent versions, so that the personal devices can also join the Tachyon Network to earn IPX.

12. What is server notice?

During the server operation, there may be some situations that may cause the server to report errors. Node Manager 2.0 will provide you with errors in the server operation process. These errors are divided into Error and Warning. Error is more important than Warning. Tachyon recommends you pay attention to the error report and take corresponding measures to make the server run well to obtain higher rewards.

13. What should I do if I receive an email concerning legal issues from a cloud service provider?

The VPN users may use your server to do something that violates the cloud service providers’ regulations. They usually send an email to ask about it. Don’t worry, this is not a criminal case. All you have to do is just explain the situation truthfully and take proactive and effective measures. We provide response templates, and you can draw a solution based on it.