What is pod?

pod is a Layer 1 primitive that takes transactions as input and produces a log (sequence of transactions) as output. It is a service that receives unordered transactions submitted into the mempool and orders them into a log. Contrary to blockchains and other consensus protocols, pod does not provide a persistent total order of transactions. While it does give some order, this order is subject to change with time — transactions “wiggle” around their positions in a somewhat predictable fashion. Accepting this wiggle room allows for making a very performant system. In particular, pod is latency-optimal and throughput-optimal. To accomplish this, we first eliminate inter-validator communication. Instead, clients send transactions directly to all validators; each validator independently processes transactions and appends them to its log. Clients then receive and extract information from these logs. Check out the pod-core paper for detailed pseudo-code and formal analysis.