Archethic uses its proprietary ARCH consensus mechanism, which is similar to the [directed acyclic graph](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/directed-acyclic-graph-dag) consensus mechanism due to its treatment of transactions as atomic units. Mining is based on cryptographic verification to validate and secure the origin of a transaction (biometric devices, smartphones, hardware or software keys). Thus, only 295 miners are required to validate transactions. Anyone can own a storage node, but the network chooses which miners get to validate transactions in a fair and geographically distributed way. Early investors have preferential treatment to be chosen as miners.
Since transactions are chained together individually, each transaction chain will be stored in a reproducible and ordered way on a set of nodes. Therefore, each node will independently know all the nodes hosting a given transaction and, thus, will be able to relieve the network by interrogating only the closest "elected" nodes. This makes the system geo-secure and capable of self-repair.