Related papers: Proof-of-randomness protocol for blockchain consen…
Consensus protocols inherently rely on the notion of leader election, in which one or a subset of participants are temporarily elected to authorize and announce the network's latest state. While leader election is a well studied problem,…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism is popular among current blockchain systems, which leads to an increasing concern about the tremendous waste of energy due to massive meaningless computation. To address this issue, we propose a novel…
Fault-tolerant distributed systems move the trust in a single party to a majority of parties participating in the protocol. This makes blockchain based crypto-currencies possible: they allow parties to agree on a total order of transactions…
This paper introduces Proof of Team Sprint (PoTS), a novel consensus algorithm designed to address the significant energy inefficiencies inherent in traditional Proof of Work (PoW) systems. PoTS shifts the consensus mechanism from an…
Consensus algorithms are central to blockchain technology and an emerging research area. In this paper, we begin with an overview of the different types and architectures of blockchain networks. Then, with a focus on consortium blockchains,…
With the development of decentralized consensus protocols, permissionless blockchains have been envisioned as a promising enabler for the general-purpose transaction-driven, autonomous systems. However, most of the prevalent blockchain…
Blockchain, the technology behind the popular Bitcoin, is considered a "security by design" system as it is meant to create security among a group of distrustful parties yet without a central trusted authority. The security of blockchain…
Most concurrent blockchain systems rely heavily on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanisms for decentralized consensus and security assurance. However, the substantial energy expenditure stemming from computationally…
In blockchain systems, especially cryptographic currencies such as Bitcoin, the double-spending and Byzantine-general-like problem are solved by reaching consensus protocols among all nodes. The state-of-the-art protocols include…
Certified randomness can be generated with untrusted remote quantum computers using multiple known protocols, one of which has been recently realized experimentally. Unlike the randomness sources accessible on today's classical computers,…
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…
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 revisit the longstanding open problem of implementing Nakamoto's proof-of-work (PoW) consensus based on a real-world computational task $T(x)$ (as opposed to artificial random hashing), in a truly permissionless setting where the miner…
We improve the fundamental security threshold of eventual consensus Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain protocols under the longest-chain rule by showing, for the first time, the positive effect of rounds with concurrent honest leaders. Current…
Blockchain protocols implement total-order broadcast in a permissionless setting, where processes can freely join and leave. In such a setting, to safeguard against Sybil attacks, correct processes rely on cryptographic proofs tied to a…
Designing an efficient difficulty control algorithm is an essential problem in Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchains because the network hash rate is randomly changing. This paper proposes a general difficulty control algorithm and provides…
Most online lotteries today fail to ensure the verifiability of the random process and rely on a trusted third party. This issue has received little attention since the emergence of distributed protocols like Bitcoin that demonstrated the…
Blockchain protocols differ in fundamental ways, including the mechanics of selecting users to produce blocks (e.g., proof-of-work vs. proof-of-stake) and the method to establish consensus (e.g., longest chain rules vs. Byzantine…
The specification of state machine replication (SMR) has no requirement on the final total order of commands. In blockchains based on SMR, however, order matters, since different orders could provide their clients with different financial…
We lay the foundations for a blockchain scheme, whose consensus is reached via a proof of work algorithm based on the solution of consecutive discrete logarithm problems over the point group of elliptic curves. In the considered…