Related papers: Light Clients for Lazy Blockchains
Light clients are gaining increasing attention in the literature since they obviate the need for users to set up dedicated blockchain full nodes. While the literature features a number of light client instantiations, most light client…
We conduct a systematic study on the light client of permissionless blockchains, in the setting where the full nodes and the light clients are rational. Under such a game-theoretic model, we design a superlight-client protocol to enable a…
We propose LazyLedger, a design for distributed ledgers where the blockchain is optimised for solely ordering and guaranteeing the availability of transaction data. Responsibility for executing and validating transactions is shifted to only…
Light clients, also known as Simple Payment Verification (SPV) clients, are nodes which only download a small portion of the data in a blockchain, and use indirect means to verify that a given chain is valid. Typically, instead of…
Full nodes in a blockchain network store and verify a copy of the whole blockchain. Unlike full nodes, light clients are low-capacity devices that want to validate certain data on a blockchain. They query the data they want from a full…
Blockchain applications often rely on lightweight clients to access and verify on-chain data efficiently without the need to run a resource-intensive full node. These light clients must maintain robust security to protect the blockchain's…
Blockchains are among the most powerful technologies to realize decentralized information systems. In order to safely enjoy all guarantees provided by a blockchain, one should maintain a full node, therefore maintaining an updated local…
Blockchain protocols are based on a distributed database where stored data is guaranteed to be immutable. The requirement that all nodes have to maintain their own local copy of the database ensures security while consensus mechanisms help…
Merkle structures are widely used as commitment schemes: they allow a prover to publish a compact commitment to an ordered list $X$ of items, and then efficiently prove to a verifier that $x_i\in X$ is the $i$-th item in it. We compare…
As blockchains continue to seek to scale to a larger number of nodes, the communication complexity of protocols has become a significant priority as the network can quickly become overburdened. Several schemes have attempted to address…
Validating a blockchain incurs heavy computation, communication, and storage costs. As a result, clients with limited resources, called light nodes, cannot verify transactions independently and must trust full nodes, making them vulnerable…
Clients of permissionless blockchain systems, like Bitcoin, rely on an underlying peer-to-peer network to send and receive transactions. It is critical that a client is connected to at least one honest peer, as otherwise the client can be…
Public blockchains provide a decentralized method for storing transaction data and have many applications in different sectors. In order for users to track transactions, a simple method is to let them keep a local copy of the entire public…
A key performance metric in blockchains is the latency between when a transaction is broadcast and when it is confirmed (the so-called, confirmation latency). While improvements in consensus techniques can lead to lower confirmation…
The development of blockchain technologies has enabled the trustless execution of so-called smart contracts, i.e. programs that regulate the exchange of assets (e.g., cryptocurrency) between users. In a decentralized blockchain, the state…
Micropayment channels are the most prominent solution to the limitation on transaction throughput in current blockchain systems. However, in practice channels are risky because participants have to be online constantly to avoid fraud, and…
This paper presents a mathematically rigorous formal analysis of Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) clients, as specified in Section 8 of the original Bitcoin white paper, versus non-mining full nodes operated by home users. It defines…
Popular Ethereum wallets (like MetaMask) entrust centralized infrastructure providers (e.g., Infura) to run the consensus client logic on their behalf. As a result, these wallets are light-weight and high-performant, but come with security…
Cross-Blockchain communication has gained traction due to the increasing fragmentation of blockchain networks and scalability solutions such as side-chaining and sharding. With SmartSync, we propose a novel concept for cross-blockchain…
Blockchain systems and smart contracts provide ways to securely implement multi-party transactions without the use of trusted intermediaries, which currently underpin many commercial transactions. However, they do so by transferring trust…