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Welcome to the ion wiki!

Ion (Inter-operability network) is the operability framework for Photon. Currently in its development phase a number of solutions are being investigated.

Ion Vision

The core functionality of Ion is to perform cross-chain transactions of either base ccy, such as ETH or BTC, or tokens. Currently Ion is solution agnostic though a plasma based PoC is in development.

Desirable properties:

There is no window where it is possible to double-spend, e.g. waiting for 3 confirmations
Each transaction accepted into a block is finalised, it can never be revoked.
It is the duty of the receiver to verify that no message is acted upon twice
Altering the content of a merkle root would allow malicous events to be triggered and funds to be withdrawn because the on-chain contracts and other systems rely on the merkle root being the single source of authority.

Threat model:

One or more witnesses are malicious
All witnesses are malicious

Double-spending is prevented as long as the following constraints are enforced:

The transaction signature is only valid for one block
A transaction reference may only occur once on a block
Only the owner of the from address can update a payment by providing a new signature
Blocks are applied sequentially
The verifier nodes keep a list of all current balances
Payments within a block never exceed their available balance