Ergo, a Resilient Decentralized Platform for Contractual Sound Money

The overwhelming majority of successful public blockchain usecases are about financial applications, even in platforms that claim to be general-purpose decentralized world computers. For example, if an oracle is writing non-financial data into a blockchain, this data is usually written to be used in a financial contract.
Ergo offers a powerful and protocol‐friendly scripting language based on Σ‐protocols (referred to as "Sigma Protocols"), that enables specifying conditions under which a coin can be used. In the simple case, a coin can be spent at any time by an owner of a secret key, but more complex spending conditions may specify multiple coin holders, the time of spending, to whom or what group the coins can be spent and so on, enabling the implementation of contracts of complexity far in excess of those of other secure distributed blockchains currently in existence.

Ergo is built from the ground‐up to resist centralization at all levels. Ergo has both an ASIC and pool resistant Proof-of-Work algorithm, preventing blockchain centralization in the hands of miners and pool operators. Its treasury system prevents governance and development centralization, while light nodes with high-security guaranties prevent services centralization.

Ergo platform absorbs ready-to-use ideas, that are well-tested and formalized in scientific papers. Its primary focus is to provide an efficient, secure and easy way to implement financial contracts that will be useful and survivable in the long term. Finally, Ergo is a self-amendable protocol, that allows it to absorb new ideas and improve itself in the future in a decentralized manner."