Related papers: Light Clients for Lazy Blockchains
Blockchain and blockchain-inspired decentralized applications are on the rise thanks to their unique characteristics such as their decentralized nature, anonymity, and tamper-proof nature; however, blockchain transactions tend to experience…
Decentralized blockchain platforms have enabled the secure exchange of crypto-assets without the intermediation of trusted authorities. To this purpose, these platforms rely on a peer-to-peer network of byzantine nodes, which…
Client diversity is a cornerstone of blockchain resilience, yet most networks suffer from a dangerously skewed distribution of client implementations. This monoculture exposes the network to very risky scenarios, such as massive financial…
Payment channel networks are an approach to improve the scalability of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. The Lightning Network is a payment channel network built for Bitcoin that is already used in practice. Because the Lightning Network…
An emerging blockchain protocol design pattern leverages the asymmetry between the computational effort in performing versus verifying tasks. For example, cryptographic validity proofs (e.g., SNARKS) require the prover to expend significant…
Public blockchains like Ethereum use Merkle trees to verify transactions received from untrusted servers before applying them to the blockchain. We empirically show that the low throughput of such blockchains is due to the I/O bottleneck…
In recent years, manifold blockchain protocols have been proposed by researchers and industrial companies alike. This has led to a very heterogeneous blockchain landscape. Accordingly, it would be desirable if blockchains could interact…
Most permissionless blockchain networks run on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, which offer flexibility and decentralization at the expense of performance (e.g., network latency). Historically, this tradeoff has not been a bottleneck for most…
Blockchain technology enables the execution of collaborative business processes involving untrusted parties without requiring a central authority. Specifically, a process model comprising tasks performed by multiple parties can be…
A blockchain, such as Bitcoin, is an append-only, secure, transparent, distributed ledger. A fair blockchain is expected to have healthy metrics; high honest mining power, low processing latency, i.e., low wait times for transactions and…
The Bitcoin Lightning network is a mechanism to enable fast and inexpensive off-chain Bitcoin transactions using peer-to-peer (P2P) channels between nodes that can also be composed into a routing path. Although the resulting possible…
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…
Permissioned blockchains promise secure decentralized data management in business-to-business use-cases. In contrast to Bitcoin and similar public blockchains which rely on Proof-of-Work for consensus and are deployed on thousands of…
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…
Blockchain is increasingly being used to provide a distributed, secure, trusted, and private framework for energy trading in smart grids. However, existing solutions suffer from lack of privacy, processing and packet overheads, and reliance…
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.,…
While showing great promise, Bitcoin requires users to wait tens of minutes for transactions to commit, and even then, offering only probabilistic guarantees. This paper introduces ByzCoin, a novel Byzantine consensus protocol that…
The development of underlying technologies in blockchain mostly revolves around a difficult problem: how to enhance the performance of the system and reduce various costs of nodes (such as communication, storage and verification) without…
Performance and scalability are major concerns for blockchains: permissionless systems are typically limited by slow proof of X consensus algorithms and sequential post-order transaction execution on every node of the network. By…
The blockchain technology enables mutually untrusting participants to reach consensus on the state of a distributed and decentralized ledger (called a blockchain) in a permissionless setting. The consensus protocol of the blockchain imposes…