Related papers: The Consensus Number of a Cryptocurrency (Extended…
Many blockchain-based protocols, such as Bitcoin, implement a decentralized asset transfer (or exchange) system. As clearly stated in the original paper by Nakamoto, the crux of this problem lies in prohibiting any participant from engaging…
A typical blockchain protocol uses consensus to make sure that mutually mistrusting users agree on the order in which their operations on shared data are executed. However, it is known that asset transfer systems, by far the most popular…
The last decade has seen a variety of Asset-Transfer systems designed for decentralized environments. To address the problem of double-spending, these systems inherently make strong model assumptions and spend a lot of resources. In this…
This paper introduces a new asynchronous Byzantine-tolerant asset transfer system (cryptocurrency) with three noteworthy properties: quasi-anonymity, lightness, and consensus-freedom. Quasi-anonymity means no information is leaked regarding…
Blockchain technology offers a decentralized and secure method for storing and authenticating data, rendering it well-suited for various applications such as digital currencies, supply chain management, and voting systems. However, the…
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…
Decentralized payment systems such as Bitcoin have become massively popular in the last few years, yet there is still much to be done in understanding their formal properties. The vast majority of decentralized payment systems work by…
Digital money can be implemented efficiently by avoiding consensus. However, no-consensus implementations have drawbacks, as they cannot support smart contracts, and (even more fundamentally) they cannot deal with conflicting transactions.…
Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithms are at the core of providing safety and liveness guarantees for distributed systems that must operate in the presence of arbitrary failures. Recently, numerous new BFT algorithms have been…
Recently, the blockchain technique was put in the spotlight as it introduced a systematic approach for multiple parties to reach consensus without needing trust. However, the application of this technique in practice is severely restricted…
Today, several solutions for cross-blockchain asset transfers exist. However, these solutions are either tailored to specific assets or neglect finality guarantees that prevent assets from getting lost in transit. In this paper, we present…
Fault-tolerant consensus has been studied extensively in the literature, because it is one of the most important distributed primitives and has wide applications in practice. This paper surveys important results on fault-tolerant consensus…
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…
It has recently been shown that, contrarily to a common belief, money transfer in the presence of faulty (Byzantine) processes does not require strong agreement such as consensus. This article goes one step further: namely, it first…
Money transfer is an abstraction that realizes the core of cryptocurrencies. It has been shown that, contrary to common belief, money transfer in the presence of Byzantine faults can be implemented in asynchronous networks and does not…
Consensus is arguably one of the most important notions in distributed computing. Among asynchronous, randomized, and signature-free implementations, the protocols of Most\'efaoui et al. (PODC 2014 and JACM 2015) represent a landmark…
Consensus algorithms provide strategies to solve problems in a distributed system with the added constraint that data can only be shared between adjacent computing nodes. We find these algorithms in applications for wireless and sensor…
We consider the problem of cross-chain payment whereby customers of different escrows---implemented by a bank or a blockchain smart contract---successfully transfer digital assets without trusting each other. Prior to this work, cross-chain…
Throughput limitations of existing blockchain architectures are one of the most significant hurdles for their wide-spread adoption. Attempts to address this challenge include layer-2 solutions, such as Bitcoin's Lightning or Ethereum's…
Decentralized blockchain platforms have enabled the secure exchange of crypto-assets without the intermediation of trusted authorities. To this purpose, these platforms rely on a peer-to-peer network of byzantine nodes, which…