Related papers: Combining GHOST and Casper
Consensus is one of the most fundamental distributed computing problems. In particular, it serves as a building block in many replication based fault-tolerant systems and in particular in multiple recent blockchain solutions. Depending on…
Sidechain technology has been envisioned as a promising solution to accelerate today's public blockchains in terms of scalability and interoperability. By relying on the mainchain for security, different sidechains can formulate their own…
A fundamental conflict of many proof-of-work systems is that they want to achieve inclusiveness and security at the same time. We analyze and resolve this conflict with a theory of proof-of-work quorums, which enables a new bridge between…
We describe \emph{Fantom}, a framework for asynchronous distributed systems. \emph{Fantom} is based on the Lachesis Protocol~\cite{lachesis01}, which uses asynchronous event transmission for practical Byzantine fault tolerance (pBFT) to…
This paper presents a novel leaderless protocol (FPC-BI: Fast Probabilistic Consensus within Byzantine Infrastructures) with a low communicational complexity and which allows a set of nodes to come to a consensus on a value of a single bit.…
Layer 1 (L1) blockchains such as Ethereum are secured under an "honest supermajority of stake" assumption for a large pool of validators who verify each and every transaction on it. This high security comes at a scalability cost which not…
Blockchain technology and related frameworks have recently received extensive attention. Blockchain systems use multi-party consensus protocols to reach agreements on transactions. Hyperledger Fabric framework exposes a multi-party…
We analyze the economic incentives generated by the proof-of-stake mechanism discussed in the Ethereum Casper upgrade proposal. Compared with proof-of-work, proof-of-stake has a different cost structure for attackers. In Budish (2018),…
The paper examines decentralized cryptocurrency protocols that are based on the use of internal tokens as identity tools. An analysis of security problems with popular Proof-of-stake consensus protocols is provided. A new protocol,…
This document describes a new consensus algorithm which is asynchronous and uses gossip based message dissemination between nodes. The current version of the algorithm does not cover the case of a node failure or significantly delayed…
To address the large amount of energy wasted by blockchains, we propose a decentralized consensus protocol for blockchains in which the computation can be used to search for good approximate solutions to any optimization problem. Our…
Current blockchain consensus protocols -- notably, Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) -- deliver global agreement but exhibit structural constraints. PoW anchors security in heavy computation, inflating energy use and imposing…
Consensus protocols used today in blockchains often rely on computational power or financial stakes - scarce resources. We propose a novel protocol using social capital - trust and influence from social interactions - as a non-transferable…
Proof-of-Stake blockchains based on a longest-chain consensus protocol are an attractive energy-friendly alternative to the Proof-of-Work paradigm. However, formal barriers to "getting the incentives right" were recently discovered, driven…
Proof-of-work allows Bitcoin to boast security amidst arbitrary fluctuations in participation of miners throughout time, so long as, at any point in time, a majority of hash power is honest. In recent years, however, the pendulum has…
The paper presents Tendermint, a new protocol for ordering events in a distributed network under adversarial conditions. More commonly known as Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus or atomic broadcast, the problem has attracted…
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.…
We present Blizzard, a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) distributed ledger protocol that is aimed at making mobile devices first-class citizens in the consensus process. Blizzard introduces a novel two-tier architecture by having the mobile…
Since the Merge update upon which Ethereum transitioned to Proof of Stake, it has been touted that it resulted in lower power consumption and increased security. However, even if that is the case, can this state be sustained? In this paper,…
With the advancement of blockchain systems, many recent research works have proposed distributed ledger technology~(DLT) that employs Byzantine fault-tolerant~(BFT) consensus protocols to decide which block to append next to the ledger.…