Related papers: Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget
Committee-based blockchains are among the most popular alternatives of proof-of-work based blockchains, such as Bitcoin. They provide strong consistency (no fork) under classical assumptions, and avoid using energy-consuming mechanisms to…
Recent works have proposed new Byzantine consensus algorithms for blockchains based on epidemics, a design which enables highly scalable performance at a low cost. These methods however critically depend on a secure random peer sampling…
Blockchains is a special type of distributed systems that operates in unsafe networks. In most blockchains, all nodes should reach consensus on all state transitions with Byzantine fault tolerant algorithms, which creates bottlenecks in…
Ethereum has undergone a recent change called \textit{the Merge}, which made Ethereum a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, shifting closer to BFT consensus. Ethereum, which wished to keep the best of the two protocol designs (BFT and…
We introduce Unity, a new consensus algorithm for public blockchain settings. Unity is an eventual consistency protocol merging the Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) into a coherent stochastic process. It encompasses hardware and…
An emerging blockchain protocol design pattern leverages the asymmetry between the computational effort in performing versus verifying tasks. For example, cryptographic validity proofs (e.g., SNARKS) require the prover to expend significant…
With the increasing adoption of decentralized information systems based on a variety of permissionless blockchain networks, the choice of consensus mechanism is at the core of many controversial discussions. Ethereum's recent transition…
Byzantine fault tolerant protocols enable state replication in the presence of crashed, malfunctioning, or actively malicious processes. Designing such protocols without the assistance of verification tools, however, is remarkably…
Many blockchain-based decentralized services require their validators (operators) to deposit stake (collateral), which is forfeited (slashed) if they misbehave. Restaking networks let validators secure multiple services by reusing stake.…
Blockchains combine other technologies, such as cryptography, networking, and incentive mechanisms, to enable the creation, validation, and recording of transactions between participating nodes. A consensus algorithm is used in a blockchain…
Byzantine Consensus is fundamental for building consistent and fault-tolerant distributed systems. In traditional quorum-based consensus protocols, quorums are defined using globally known assumptions shared among all participants.…
Proof-of-stake blockchain protocols have emerged as a compelling paradigm for organizing distributed ledger systems. In proof-of-stake (PoS), a subset of stakeholders participate in validating a growing ledger of transactions. For the…
The practical Byzantine fault tolerant (PBFT) consensus protocol is one of the basic consensus protocols in the development of blockchain technology. At the same time, the PBFT consensus protocol forms a basis for some other important BFT…
We introduce Unity Interleave, a new consensus algorithm for public blockchain settings. It is an eventual consistency protocol merging the Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) into a coherent stochastic process. It builds upon…
The Hashgraph consensus algorithm is an algorithm for asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance intended for distributed shared ledgers. Its main distinguishing characteristic is it achieves consensus without exchanging any extra messages;…
FastPay allows a set of distributed authorities, some of which are Byzantine, to maintain a high-integrity and availability settlement system for pre-funded payments. It can be used to settle payments in a native unit of value…
The security of blockchain systems is fundamentally based on the decentralized consensus in which the majority of parties behave honestly, and the content verification process is essential to maintaining the robustness of blockchain…
To implement a blockchain, the trend is now to integrate a non-trivial Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithm instead of the seminal idea of waiting to receive blocks to decide upon the longest branch. After a decade of existence,…
This paper presents IBFT, a simple and elegant Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus algorithm that is used to implement state machine replication in the \emph{Quorum} blockchain. IBFT assumes a partially synchronous communication model, where…
The state-of-the-art approach to manage blockchains is to process blocks of transactions in a shared-nothing environment. Although blockchains have the potential to provide various services for high-performance computing (HPC) systems, HPC…