Related papers: Combining GHOST and Casper
Trustless systems, such as those blockchain enpowered, provide trust in the system regardless of the trust of its participants, who may be honest or malicious. Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols and DAG-based approaches have emerged as a better…
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…
A Confirmation Rule, within blockchain networks, refers to an algorithm implemented by network nodes that determines (either probabilistically or deterministically) the permanence of certain blocks on the blockchain. An example of…
The choice of the consensus method ultimately determines throughput, scalability, tamper resistance, and consistency of a blockchain system. However, across all the types of blockchain (private, semi-private, consortium, or public), there…
Initiated from Nakamoto's Bitcoin system, blockchain technology has demonstrated great capability of building secure consensus among decentralized parties at Internet-scale, i.e., without relying on any centralized trusted party. Nowadays,…
Fault-tolerant distributed systems move the trust in a single party to a majority of parties participating in the protocol. This makes blockchain based crypto-currencies possible: they allow parties to agree on a total order of transactions…
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…
In this paper, we informally introduce the Pulsar proof of stake consensus paper and discuss the relevant design decisions and considerations. The Pulsar protocol we propose is designed to facilitate the creation of a proof of stake…
For applications of Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols where the participants are economic agents, recent works highlighted the importance of accountability: the ability to identify participants who provably violate the…
Gas is a measurement unit of the computational effort that it will take to execute every single operation that takes part in the Ethereum blockchain platform. Each instruction executed by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) has an associated…
We present the main concepts, components, and usage of GASOL, a Gas AnalysiS and Optimization tooL for Ethereum smart contracts. GASOL offers a wide variety of cost models that allow inferring the gas consumption associated to selected…
With the rise of digital currency systems that rely on blockchain to ensure ledger security, the ability to perform cross-chain transactions is becoming a crucial interoperability requirement. Such transactions allow not only funds to be…
We present Large-scale Known-committee Stake-based Agreement (LaKSA), a chain-based Proof-of-Stake protocol that is dedicated, but not limited, to cryptocurrencies. LaKSA minimizes interactions between nodes through lightweight committee…
This paper introduces a family of leaderless Byzantine fault tolerance protocols, built around a metastable mechanism via network subsampling. These protocols provide a strong probabilistic safety guarantee in the presence of Byzantine…
Many protocols in distributed computing rely on a source of randomness, usually called a random beacon, both for their applicability and security. This is especially true for proof-of-stake blockchain protocols in which the next miner or…
The availability-finality dilemma says that blockchain protocols cannot be both available under dynamic participation and safe under network partition. Snap-and-chat protocols have recently been proposed as a resolution to this dilemma. A…
Motivated by proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains such as Ethereum, two key desiderata have recently been studied for Byzantine-fault tolerant (BFT) state-machine replication (SMR) consensus protocols: Finality means that the protocol retains…
Smart contracts are full-fledged programs that run on blockchains (e.g., Ethereum, one of the most popular blockchains). In Ethereum, gas (in Ether, a cryptographic currency like Bitcoin) is the execution fee compensating the computing…
The consensus protocol is a critical component of distributed ledgers and blockchains. Achieving consensus over a decentralized network poses challenges to transaction finality and performance. Currently, the highest-performing consensus…
We report our experience in the formal verification of the reference implementation of the Beacon Chain. The Beacon Chain is the backbone component of the new Proof-of-Stake Ethereum 2.0 network: it is in charge of tracking information…