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Today's blockchains suffer from low throughput and high latency, which impedes their widespread adoption of more complex applications like smart contracts. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm for smart contract execution. It…
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…
Permissionless blockchain protocols are known to consume an outrageous amount of computing power and suffer from a trade-off between latency and confidence in transaction confirmation. The recently proposed Algorand blockchain protocol…
Fueled by the growing popularity of proof-of-stake blockchains, there has been increasing interest and progress in permissioned consensus protocols, which could provide a simpler alternative to existing protocols, such as Paxos and PBFT. In…
Consensus protocols are currently the bottlenecks that prevent blockchain systems from scaling. However, we argue that transaction execution is also important to the performance and security of blockchains. In other words, there are ample…
Blockchain technologies are expected to make a significant impact on a variety of industries. However, one issue holding them back is their limited transaction throughput, especially compared to established solutions such as distributed…
Blockchain has received tremendous attention in non-monetary applications including the Internet of Things (IoT) due to its salient features including decentralization, security, auditability, and anonymity. Most conventional blockchains…
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…
Blockchains are distributed secure ledgers to which transactions are issued continuously and each block of transactions is tightly coupled to its predecessors. Permissioned blockchains place special emphasis on transactions throughput. In…
Despite the success in various scenarios, blockchain systems, especially EVM-compatible ones that serially execute transactions, still face the significant challenge of limited throughput. Concurrent transaction execution is a promising…
Snowman is the consensus protocol run by blockchains on Avalanche. Recent work established a rigorous proof of probabilistic consistency for Snowman in the \emph{synchronous} setting, under the simplifying assumption that correct processes…
Scalability remains one of the biggest challenges to the adoption of permissioned blockchain technologies for large-scale deployments. Permissioned blockchains typically exhibit low latencies, compared to permissionless deployments --…
Many studies have been done to improve the performance of centrally controlled business processes and enhance the integration between different parties of these collaborations. However, the most serious issues of collaborative business…
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,…
Sharding is a promising blockchain scaling solution. But it currently suffers from high latency and low throughput when it comes to cross-shard transactions, i.e., transactions that require coordination from multiple shards. The root cause…
In this paper, we consider the problem of cross-chain payment whereby customers of different escrows -- implemented by a bank or a blockchain smart contract -- successfully transfer digital assets without trusting each other. Prior to this…
Blockchain technologies can enable secure computing environments among mistrusting parties. Permissioned blockchains are particularly enlightened by companies, enterprises, and government agencies due to their efficiency, customizability,…
The proof-of-work consensus protocol suffers from two main limitations: waste of energy and offering only probabilistic guarantees about the status of the blockchain. This paper introduces SklCoin, a new Byzantine consensus protocol and its…
Traditional public blockchain systems typically had very limited transaction throughput because of the bottleneck of the consensus protocol itself. With recent advances in consensus technology, the performance limit has been greatly lifted,…
Since the inception of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology have attracted an increasing interest from both academia and industry. Among various core components, consensus protocol is the defining technology…