Mastering Blockchain - Second Edition

Notary service

In a traditional blockchain, mining is used to ascertain the order of blocks that contain transactions. In Corda, notary services are used to provide transaction ordering and timestamping services. There can be multiple notaries in a network and they are identified by composite public keys. Notaries can use different consensus algorithms like BFT or Raft depending on the requirements of the applications. Notary services sign the transactions to indicate validity and finality of the transaction which is then persisted to the database.

Notaries can be run in a load-balanced configuration in order to spread the load across the nodes for performance reasons; and, in order to reduce latency, the nodes are recommended to be run physically ...