BitShares is a decentralized, blockchain-based financial services smart contracting platform. BitShares' decentralization is based on the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus model, meaning that blocks are produced by a group of 'Witness' nodes which are elected by stake-weighted shareholder voting. In addition to the Witnesses is the Committee, a group of blockchain accounts, likewise elected by stakeholder voting, which vote to specify tunable blockchain parameters, and vote to include or reject proposed new features and other modifications to the consensus protocol.
BitShares is a smart contracting platform specifically targeted at financial contracts. It should be noted that BitShares is not a turing-complete smart contracting platform, meaning that BitShares does not support arbitrary, user-defined smart contracts; rather, BitShares provides a well-de