Related papers: Bicomp: A Bilayer Scalable Nakamoto Consensus Prot…
Leader-based consensus algorithms are vulnerable to liveness and performance downgrade attacks. We explore the possibility of replacing leader election in Multi-Paxos with random exponential backoff (REB), a simpler approach that requires…
Bitcoin's enormous success has inspired the development of alternative blockchains, such as consortium chains. Several cross-chain protocols have been proposed as ways of connecting these universes of individual blockchains in a distributed…
This paper investigates the fundamental trade-offs between block safety, confirmation latency, and transaction throughput of proof-of-work (PoW) longest-chain fork-choice protocols, also known as PoW Nakamoto consensus. New upper and lower…
A blockchain system is a replicated state machine that must be fault tolerant. When designing a blockchain system, there is usually a trade-off between decentralization, scalability, and security. In this paper, we propose a novel…
Traditional public distributed ledgers have not been able to scale-out well and work efficiently. Sharding is deemed as a promising way to solve this problem. By partitioning all nodes into small committees and letting them work in…
We present the notion of multilevel slashing, where proof-of-stake blockchain validators can obtain gradual levels of assurance that a certain block is bound to be finalized in a global consensus procedure, unless an increasing and…
In the Bitcoin white paper, Nakamoto proposed a very simple Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithm that is also known as Nakamoto consensus. Despite its simplicity, some existing analysis of Nakamoto consensus appears to be long and…
As blockchains continue to seek to scale to a larger number of nodes, the communication complexity of protocols has become a significant priority as the network can quickly become overburdened. Several schemes have attempted to address…
Although blockchain, the supporting technology of various cryptocurrencies, has offered a potentially effective framework for numerous decentralized trust management systems, its performance is still sub-optimal in real-world networks. With…
Blockchain has received tremendous attention as a secure, distributed, and anonymous framework for the Internet of Things (IoT). As a distributed system, blockchain trades off scalability for distribution, which limits the technologys…
With the growing commercial interest in blockchain, permissioned implementations have received increasing attention. Unfortunately, existing BFT consensus protocols that are the backbone of permissioned blockchains, either scale poorly or…
Blockchain technologies are facing a scalability challenge, which must be overcome to guarantee a wider adoption of the technology. This scalability issue is due to the use of consensus algorithms to guarantee the total order of the chain…
Proof-of-Stake systems randomly choose, on each round, one of the participants as a consensus leader that extends the chain with the next block such that the selection probability is proportional to the owned stake. However, distributed…
Recent developments in blockchain technology have inspired innovative new designs in resilient distributed and database systems. At their core, these blockchain applications typically use Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols to…
The state-of-the-art HotStuff operates an efficient pipeline in which a stable leader drives decisions with linear communication and two round-trips of message. However, the unifying proposing-voting pattern is not sufficient to improve the…
Increasing the transactional throughput of decentralized blockchains in a secure manner has been the holy grail of blockchain research for most of the past decade. This paper introduces a scheme for scaling blockchains while retaining…
Bitcoin is the most successful cryptocurrency so far. This is mainly due to its novel consensus algorithm, which is based on proof-of-work combined with a cryptographically-protected data structure and a rewarding scheme that incentivizes…
After the success of the Bitcoin blockchain, came several cryptocurrencies and blockchain solutions in the last decade. Nonetheless, Blockchain-based systems still suffer from low transaction rates and high transaction processing latencies,…
Distributed ledgers are common in the industry. Some of them can use blockchains as their underlying infrastructure. A blockchain requires participants to agree on its contents. This can be achieved via a consensus protocol, and several BFT…
The growing interest in reliable multi-party applications has fostered widespread adoption of Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols. Existing BFT protocols need f more replicas than Paxos-style protocols to prevent equivocation…