Related papers: On the Correctness of Speculative Consensus
We study long-term equilibria that arise in the token monetary policy, or tokenomics, design of proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain systems that engage utility maximizing users and validators. Validators are system maintainers who get rewarded…
Owing to some special characteristics and features, blockchain is a very useful technique that can securely organize diverse devices in a smart city. It finds wide applications, especially in distributed environments, where entities such as…
In the high-stakes race to develop more scalable blockchains, some platforms (Binance, Cosmos, EOS, TRON, etc.) have adopted committee-based consensus (CBC) protocols, whereby the blockchain's record-keeping rights are entrusted to a…
We present two attacks targeting the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum consensus protocol. The first attack suggests a fundamental conceptual incompatibility between PoS and the Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree (GHOST) fork choice paradigm…
We introduce Bitcoin-IPC, a software stack and protocol that scales Bitcoin towards helping it become the universal Medium of Exchange (MoE) by enabling the permissionless creation of fully programmable Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Layer-2 chains,…
Blockchain relay schemes enable cross-chain state proofs without requiring trusted intermediaries. This is achieved by applying the source blockchain's consensus validation protocol on the target blockchain. Existing chain relays allow for…
Accountability, the ability to provably identify protocol violators, gained prominence as the main economic argument for the security of proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols. Rollups, the most popular scaling solution for blockchains, typically…
A proof of the security of the Bitcoin protocol is made rigorous, and simplified in certain parts. A computational model in which an adversary can delay transmission of blocks by time $\Delta$ is considered. The protocol is generalized to…
The success of blockchain as the underlying technology for cryptocurrencies has opened up possibilities for its use in other application domains as well. The main advantages of blockchain for its potential use in other domains are its…
Proof of work (PoW), as the representative consensus protocol for blockchain, consumes enormous amounts of computation and energy to determine bookkeeping rights among miners but does not achieve any practical purposes. To address the…
Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus forms the foundation of many modern blockchains striving for both high throughput and low latency. A growing bottleneck is transaction execution and validation on the critical path of consensus,…
The Ethereum Improvement Proposal 3675 (EIP-3675) marks a significant shift, transitioning from a Proof of Work (PoW) to a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. This transition resulted in a staggering 99.95% decrease in energy…
Consensus protocols play a pivotal role to balance security and efficiency in blockchain systems. In this paper, we propose an evaluation framework for blockchain consensus protocols termed as AlphaBlock. In this framework, we compare the…
Permissionless consensus protocols require a scarce resource to regulate leader election and provide Sybil resistance. Existing paradigms such as Proof of Work and Proof of Stake instantiate this scarcity through parallelizable resources…
Consensus protocols used today in blockchains often rely on computational power or financial stakes - scarce resources. We propose a novel protocol using social capital - trust and influence from social interactions - as a non-transferable…
We study the applicability of blockchain technology for distributed event detection under resource constraints. Therefore we provide a test-suite with several promising consensus methods (Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake, Distributed…
Bitcoin mining is a wasteful and resource-intensive process. To add a block of transactions to the blockchain, miners spend a considerable amount of energy. The Bitcoin protocol, named 'proof of work' (PoW), resembles a lottery and the…
The emergence of blockchain technology has renewed the interest in consensus-based data management systems that are resilient to failures. To maximize the throughput of these systems, we have recently seen several prototype consensus…
Federated learning (FL) enables multiple participants to collaboratively train machine learning models while ensuring their data remains private and secure. Blockchain technology further enhances FL by providing stronger security, a…
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…