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Due to the increasing interest in blockchain technology for fostering secure, auditable, decentralized applications, a set of challenges associated with this technology need to be addressed. In this letter, we focus on the delay associated…
This paper investigates the fundamental trade-offs between block safety, confirmation latency, and transaction throughput of proof-of-work (PoW) longest-chain fork-choice protocols, also known as PoW Nakamoto consensus. New upper and lower…
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…
Extensive research on Nakamoto-style consensus protocols has shown that network delays degrade the security of these protocols. Established results indicate that, perhaps surprisingly, maximal security is achieved when the network is as…
Bitcoin is the first fully-decentralized permissionless blockchain protocol to achieve a high level of security, but at the expense of poor throughput and latency. Scaling the performance of Bitcoin has a been a major recent direction of…
The security of blockchain systems is fundamentally based on the decentralized consensus in which the majority of parties behave honestly, and the content verification process is essential to maintaining the robustness of blockchain…
Existing blockchain systems scale poorly because of their distributed consensus protocols. Current attempts at improving blockchain scalability are limited to cryptocurrency. Scaling blockchain systems under general workloads (i.e.,…
Throughput limitations of existing blockchain architectures are well documented and are one of the most significant hurdles for their wide-spread adoption. In our previous proof-of-concept work, we have shown that separating computation…
While Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the most widely used consensus mechanism for blockchain, it received harsh criticism due to its massive waste of energy for meaningless hash calculation. Some studies have introduced Proof-of-Stake to address…
The protocol for cryptocurrencies can be divided into three parts, namely consensus, wallet, and networking overlay. The aim of the consensus part is to bring trustless rational peer-to-peer nodes to an agreement to the current status of…
In this paper, we propose two models for scaling the transaction throughput in Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchain networks. In the first approach, a mathematical model has derived for optimal transaction throughput for PoW based longest…
Proof of Stake (PoS) protocols rely on voting mechanisms to reach consensus on the current state. If an enhanced majority of staking nodes, also called validators, agree on a proposed block, then this block is appended to the blockchain.…
Contemporary blockchain such as Bitcoin and Ethereum execute transactions serially by miners and validators and determine the Proof-of-Work (PoW). Such serial execution is unable to exploit modern multi-core resources efficiently, hence…
This study explores the intricacies of waiting games, a novel dynamic that emerged with Ethereum's transition to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS)-based block proposer selection protocol. Within this PoS framework, validators acquire a distinct…
Bitcoin is the first of its kind, a truly decentralized and anonymous cryptocurrency. To realize it, it has developed blockchain technology using the concept of `Proof of Work' (PoW). The miners, nodes responsible for writing transaction…
Proof of Work (PoW) has extensively served as the foundation of blockchain's security, consistency, and tamper-resistance. However, long has it been criticized for its tremendous and inefficient utilization of computational power and…
The successive generations of consensus algorithms have progressively shifted the performance bottleneck of blockchains to the execution layer. While recent works address this by parallelizing transaction execution, they often overlook the…
This paper introduces BlockReduce, a Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchain system which achieves high transaction throughput through a hierarchy of merged mined blockchains, each operating in parallel on a partition the overall application…
We revisit the longstanding open problem of implementing Nakamoto's proof-of-work (PoW) consensus based on a real-world computational task $T(x)$ (as opposed to artificial random hashing), in a truly permissionless setting where the miner…
Blockchain stores information into a chain of "blocks", whose integrity is usually guaranteed by Proof of Work (PoW). In many blockchain applications (including cryptocurrencies), users compete with each other to win the ownership of the…