English

Carbon: Scaling Trusted Payments with Untrusted Machines

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing 2024-08-16 v3

Abstract

This paper introduces Carbon, a high-throughput system enabling asynchronous (safe) and consensus-free (efficient) payments and votes within a dynamic set of clients. Carbon is operated by a dynamic set of validators that may be reconfigured asynchronously, offering its clients eclipse resistance as well as lightweight bootstrap. Carbon offers clients the ability to select validators by voting them in and out of the system thanks to its novel asynchronous and stake-less voting mechanism. Carbon relies on an asynchronous and deterministic implementation of Byzantine reliable broadcast that uniquely leverages a permissionless set of untrusted servers, brokers, to slash the cost of client authentication inherent to Byzantine fault tolerant systems. Carbon is able to sustain a throughput of one million payments per second in a geo-distributed environment, outperforming the state of the art by three orders of magnitude with equivalent latencies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.09580,
  title  = {Carbon: Scaling Trusted Payments with Untrusted Machines},
  author = {Martina Camaioni and Rachid Guerraoui and Jovan Komatovic and Matteo Monti and Pierre-Louis Roman and Manuel Vidigueira and Gauthier Voron},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.09580},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

This is an extended version of the paper appearing at IEEE TDSC 2024 under DOI 10.1109/TDSC.2024.3428617 with formal definitions, pseudocode, and proofs added in appendices; these appendices correspond to the previous version of this paper on arXiv (arXiv:2209.09580v2)