Incentives in Ethereum's Hybrid Casper Protocol
Cryptography and Security
2021-07-20 v3 Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Computer Science and Game Theory
Abstract
We present an overview of hybrid Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG): a Proof-of-Stake checkpointing protocol overlaid onto Ethereum's Proof-of-Work blockchain. We describe its core functionalities and reward scheme, and explore its properties. Our findings indicate that Casper's implemented incentives mechanism ensures liveness, while providing safety guarantees that improve over standard Proof-of-Work protocols. Based on a minimal-impact implementation of the protocol as a smart contract on the blockchain, we discuss additional issues related to parametrisation, funding, throughput and network overhead and detect potential limitations.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1903.04205,
title = {Incentives in Ethereum's Hybrid Casper Protocol},
author = {Vitalik Buterin and Daniel Reijsbergen and Stefanos Leonardos and Georgios Piliouras},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.04205},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
Conference version: IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (2019)