For more than seven years since, the chain has been secured by a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism. Similar to how the Bitcoin blockchain works today, this requires a large number of hardware clusters, including general-purpose processing units (GPUs) and eventually, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), which consume computing resources to find the hash of a nonce. Miners who find a valid nonce broadcast a new block to the chain and receive a reward in the form of a block r...