Related papers: ABC: Proof-of-Stake without Consensus
The Bitcoin system only provides eventual consistency. For everyday life, the time to confirm a Bitcoin transaction is prohibitively slow. In this paper we propose a new system, built on the Bitcoin blockchain, which enables strong…
The core premise of permissionless blockchains is their reliable and secure operation without the need to trust any individual agent. At the heart of blockchain consensus mechanisms is an explicit cost (whether work or stake) for…
Blockchain protocols typically aspire to run in the permissionless setting, in which nodes are owned and operated by a large number of diverse and unknown entities, with each node free to start or stop running the protocol at any time. This…
Off-chain protocols (channels) are a promising solution to the scalability and privacy challenges of blockchain payments. Current proposals, however, require synchrony assumptions to preserve the safety of a channel, leaking to an adversary…
Classical and contemporary distributed consensus protocols, may they be for binary agreement, state machine replication, or blockchain consensus, require all protocol participants in a peer-to-peer system to agree on exactly the same…
A blockchain is a distributed ledger for recording transactions, maintained by many nodes without central authority through a distributed cryptographic protocol. All nodes validate the information to be appended to the blockchain, and a…
Blockchains with smart contracts are distributed ledger systems that achieve block-state consistency among distributed nodes by only allowing deterministic operations of smart contracts. However, the power of smart contracts is enabled by…
We present Accept, a simple, asynchronous transaction system that achieves perfect horizontal scaling. Usual blockchain-based transaction systems come with a fundamental throughput limitation as they require that all (potentially unrelated)…
This paper extends the blockchain sustainability framework of Budish (2018) to consider proof of stake (in addition to proof of work) consensus mechanisms and permissioned (where the number of nodes are fixed) networks. It is demonstrated…
Proof-of-Space provides an intriguing alternative for consensus protocol of permissionless blockchains due to its recyclable nature and the potential to support multiple chains simultaneously. However, a direct shared proof of the same…
Blockchain-based consensus protocols present the opportunity to develop new protocols, due to their novel requirements of open participation and explicit incentivization of participants. To address the first requirement, it is necessary to…
The performance of existing permissionless smart contract platforms such as Ethereum is limited by the consensus layer. Prism is a new proof-of-work consensus protocol that provably achieves throughput and latency up to physical limits…
In a blockchain system, consensus protocol as an incentive and security mechanism, is to ensure the participants to build the block honestly and effectively. There are different consensus protocols for blockchain, like Proof of work (PoW),…
Bitcoin is the first implementation of what has become known as a 'public permissionless' blockchain. Guaranteeing security and protocol conformity through its elegant combination of cryptographic assurances and game theoretic economic…
Blockchain has recently attracted the attention of the industry due, in part, to its ability to automate asset transfers. It requires distributed participants to reach a consensus on a block despite the presence of malicious (a.k.a.…
Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus forms the foundation of many modern blockchains striving for both high throughput and low latency. A growing bottleneck is transaction execution and validation on the critical path of consensus,…
In recent years, blockchain technology has received unparalleled attention from academia, industry, and governments all around the world. It is considered a technological breakthrough anticipated to disrupt several application domains. This…
Although blockchains have become widely popular for their use in cryptocurrencies, they are now becoming pervasive as more traditional applications adopt blockchain to ensure data security. Despite being a secured network, blockchains have…
Bitcoin is the first successful decentralized global digital cash system. Its mining process requires intense computational resources, therefore its usefulness remains a disputable topic. We aim to solve three problems with Bitcoin and…
SURFACE, standing for Secure, Use-case adaptive, and Relatively Fork-free Approach of Chain Extension, is a consensus algorithm that is designed for real-world networks and enjoys the benefits from both the Nakamoto consensus and Byzantine…