Related papers: Deconstructing Stellar Consensus (Extended Version…
Some of the recent blockchain proposals, such as Stellar and Ripple, use quorum-like structures typical for Byzantine consensus while allowing for open membership. This is achieved by constructing quorums in a decentralised way: each…
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.…
Stellar is one of the top ten cryptocurrencies in terms of market capitalization. It adopts a variant of Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), named federated Byzantine agreement (FBA), which generalizes the traditional BFT algorithm to make it…
Increased interest in scalable and high-throughput blockchains has led to an explosion in the number of committee selection methods in the literature. Committee selection mechanisms allow consensus protocols to safely select a committee, or…
Decentralisation is one of the promises introduced by blockchain technologies: fair and secure interaction amongst peers with no dominant positions, single points of failure or censorship. Decentralisation, however, appears difficult to be…
In the high-stakes race to develop more scalable blockchains, some platforms (Binance, Cosmos, EOS, TRON, etc.) have adopted committee-based consensus (CBC) protocols, whereby the blockchain's record-keeping rights are entrusted to a…
The security of many Proof-of-Stake (PoS) payment systems relies on quorum-based State Machine Replication (SMR) protocols. While classical analyses assume purely Byzantine faults, real-world systems must tolerate both arbitrary failures…
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…
The proof-of-work consensus protocol suffers from two main limitations: waste of energy and offering only probabilistic guarantees about the status of the blockchain. This paper introduces SklCoin, a new Byzantine consensus protocol and its…
The decentralized cryptocurrency Bitcoin has experienced great success but also encountered many challenges. One of the challenges has been the long confirmation time. Another challenge is the lack of incentives at certain steps of the…
Trust is the basis of any distributed, fault-tolerant, or secure system. A trust assumption specifies the failures that a system, such as a blockchain network, can tolerate and determines the conditions under which it operates correctly. In…
Blockchain is a decentralised, immutable ledger technology that has been widely adopted in many sectors for various applications such as cryptocurrencies, smart contracts and supply chain management. Distributed consensus is a fundamental…
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…
Vote-based blockchains construct a state machine replication (SMR) system among participating nodes, using Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocols to transition from one state to another. Currently, they rely on either…
Blockchain consensus is a state whereby each node in a network agrees on the current state of the blockchain. Existing protocols achieve consensus via a contest or voting procedure to select one node as a dictator to propose new blocks.…
Existing Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols address only threshold failures, where the participating nodes fail independently of each other, each one fails equally likely, and the protocol's guarantees follow from a simple…
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…
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 in decentralized systems that asynchronously receive events and which are subject to Byzantine faults is a common problem with many real-life applications. Advances in decentralized systems, such as distributed ledger (i.e.,…
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.…