Related papers: Voting-based probabilistic consensuses and their a…
Decentralized payment systems such as Bitcoin have become massively popular in the last few years, yet there is still much to be done in understanding their formal properties. The vast majority of decentralized payment systems work by…
Blockchains combine other technologies, such as cryptography, networking, and incentive mechanisms, to enable the creation, validation, and recording of transactions between participating nodes. A consensus algorithm is used in a blockchain…
Blockchain systems run consensus rules as code to agree on the state of the distributed ledger and secure the network. Changing these rules can be risky and challenging. In addition, it can often be controversial and take much effort to…
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…
The widespread adoption of large-scale machine learning models in recent years highlights the need for distributed computing for efficiency and scalability. This work introduces a novel distributed machine learning paradigm --…
Distributed algorithms solving agreement problems like consensus or state machine replication are essential components of modern fault-tolerant distributed services. They are also notoriously hard to understand and reason about. Their…
While online services emerge in all areas of life, the voting procedure in many democracies remains paper-based as the security of current online voting technology is highly disputed. We address the issue of trustworthy online voting…
Many blockchain-based algorithms, such as Bitcoin, implement a decentralized asset transfer system, often referred to as a cryptocurrency. As stated in the original paper by Nakamoto, at the heart of these systems lies the problem of…
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…
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…
We provide the first large-scale data collection of real-world approval-based committee elections. These elections have been conducted on the Polkadot blockchain as part of their Nominated Proof-of-Stake mechanism and contain around one…
Distributed ledger technology has gained wide popularity and adoption since the emergence of bitcoin in 2008 which is based on proof of work (PoW). It is a distributed, transparent and immutable database of records of all the transactions…
Threshold cryptography is essential for many blockchain protocols. For example, many protocols rely on threshold common coin to implement asynchronous consensus, leader elections, and provide support for randomized applications. Similarly,…
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.,…
Given that Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) are plutocratic, and other common consensus protocols are mostly permission-based, we look for a consensus protocol that will suit the needs of e-Democracy. In particular, what we need…
Distributed control systems require high reliability and availability guarantees despite often being deployed at the edge of network infrastructure. Edge computing resources are less secure and less reliable than centralized resources in…
Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols for dynamically available systems face a critical challenge: balancing latency and security in fluctuating node participation. Existing solutions often require multiple rounds of voting per…
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…
We study decentralized cryptocurrency protocols in which the participants do not deplete physical scarce resources. Such protocols commonly rely on Proof of Stake, i.e., on mechanisms that extend voting power to the stakeholders of the…
The concept of distributed consensus originated in the 1970s and gained widespread attention following Leslie Lamport's influential publication on the Byzantine Generals Problem in the 1980s. Over the past five decades, distributed…