Related papers: Combining GHOST and Casper
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.…
The DFINITY blockchain computer provides a secure, performant and flexible consensus mechanism. At its core, DFINITY contains a decentralized randomness beacon which acts as a verifiable random function (VRF) that produces a stream of…
Blockchain is a novel technology that is rising a lot of interest in the industrial and re- search sectors because its properties of decentralisation, immutability and data integrity. Initially, the underlying consensus mechanism has been…
Despite broad use of BFT consensus in blockchains, censorship resistance is weak: leaders can exclude transactions, a growing concern for trading and DeFi. We address this by introducing a new abstraction and protocol stack. First, we…
Longest-chain blockchain protocols, such as Bitcoin, guarantee liveness even when the number of actively participating users is variable, i.e., they are adaptive. However, they are not safe under network partitions, i.e., they do not…
Existing permissioned blockchain systems designate a fixed and explicit group of committee nodes to run a consensus protocol that confirms the same sequence of blocks among all nodes. Unfortunately, when such a permissioned blockchain runs…
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…
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…
We present Fission, a new permissionless blockchain that achieves scalability in both terms of system throughput and transaction confirmation time, while at the same time, retaining blockchain's core values of equality and decentralization.…
Censorship resistance with short-term inclusion guarantees is an important feature of decentralized systems, missing from many state-of-the-art and even deployed consensus protocols. In leader-based protocols the leader arbitrarily selects…
The Algorand blockchain is a secure and decentralized public ledger based on pure proof of stake rather than proof of work. At its core it is a novel consensus protocol with exactly one block certified in each round: that is, the protocol…
On September 15, 2022, the Ethereum network adopted a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. We study the impact on the network and competing platforms in a two month event window around the Beacon chain merge. We find that the…
This paper consolidates the core technologies and key concepts of our novel Lachesis consensus protocol and Fantom Opera platform, which is permissionless, leaderless and EVM compatible. We introduce our new protocol, so-called Lachesis,…
Blockchains face a scalability limitation, partly due to the throughput limitations of consensus protocols, especially when aiming to obtain a high degree of decentralization. Layer 2 Rollups (L2s) are a faster alternative to conventional…
To maximize performance, many modern blockchain systems rely on eventually-synchronous, Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols. Two protocol designs have emerged in this space: protocols that minimize latency using a leader that…
Proof-of-stake blockchain protocols have emerged as a compelling paradigm for organizing distributed ledger systems. In proof-of-stake (PoS), a subset of stakeholders participate in validating a growing ledger of transactions. For the…
We present HotStuff, a leader-based Byzantine fault-tolerant replication protocol for the partially synchronous model. Once network communication becomes synchronous, HotStuff enables a correct leader to drive the protocol to consensus at…
A family of leaderless, decentralized consensus protocols, called Snow consensus was introduced in a recent whitepaper by Yin et al. These protocols address limitations of existing consensus methods, such as those using proof-of-work or…
The classic Fischer, Lynch, and Paterson impossibility proof demonstrates that any deterministic protocol for consensus in either a message-passing or shared-memory system must violate at least one of termination, validity, or agreement in…
Consensus protocols play a pivotal role to balance security and efficiency in blockchain systems. In this paper, we propose an evaluation framework for blockchain consensus protocols termed as AlphaBlock. In this framework, we compare the…