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Blockchain sharding has emerged as a promising solution to the scalability challenges in traditional blockchain systems by partitioning the network into smaller, manageable subsets called shards. Despite its potential, existing sharding…
To maximize performance, many modern blockchain systems rely on eventually-synchronous, Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols. Two protocol designs have emerged in this space: protocols that minimize latency using a leader that…
Gasper, the consensus protocol currently employed by Ethereum, typically requires 64 to 95 slots -- the units of time during which a new chain extending the previous one by one block is proposed and voted -- to finalize. This means that…
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,…
This work addresses the inherent issues of high latency in blockchains and low scalability in traditional consensus protocols. We present pod, a novel notion of consensus whose first priority is to achieve the physically-optimal latency of…
The availability-finality dilemma says that blockchain protocols cannot be both available under dynamic participation and safe under network partition. Snap-and-chat protocols have recently been proposed as a resolution to this dilemma. A…
DAG-Rider popularized a new paradigm of DAG-BFT protocols, separating dissemination from consensus: all nodes disseminate transactions as blocks that reference previously known blocks, while consensus is reached by electing certain blocks…
This paper examines resilient dynamic leader-follower consensus within multi-agent systems, where agents share first-order or second-order dynamics. The aim is to develop distributed protocols enabling nonfaulty/normal followers to…
A family of leaderless, decentralized consensus protocols, called Snow consensus was introduced in a recent whitepaper by Yin et al. These protocols address limitations of existing consensus methods, such as those using proof-of-work or…
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…
GHOST, like the longest-chain protocol, is a chain selection protocol and its capability in resisting selfish mining attack has been validated in imperfect blockchains of Bitcoin and its variants (Bitcoin-like). This paper explores an…
Dynamic availability is the ability of a consensus protocol to remain live despite honest participants going offline and later rejoining. A well-known limitation is that dynamically available protocols, on their own, cannot provide strong…
Optimistic responsiveness -- the ability of a consensus protocol to operate at the speed of the network -- is widely used in consensus protocol design to optimize latency and throughput. However, blockchain applications incentivize…
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…
Consensus is arguably one of the most important notions in distributed computing. Among asynchronous, randomized, and signature-free implementations, the protocols of Most\'efaoui et al. (PODC 2014 and JACM 2015) represent a landmark…
Distributed ledgers are common in the industry. Some of them can use blockchains as their underlying infrastructure. A blockchain requires participants to agree on its contents. This can be achieved via a consensus protocol, and several BFT…
Vote-based blockchains construct a state machine replication (SMR) system among participating nodes, using Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocols to transition from one state to another. Currently, they rely on either…
In modern healthcare systems, being able to share electronic health records is crucial for providing quality care and for enabling a larger spectrum of health services. Health data sharing is dependent on obtaining individual consent which,…
Distributed consensus is a key enabler for many distributed systems including distributed databases and blockchains. Canopus is a scalable distributed consensus protocol that ensures that live nodes in a system agree on an ordered sequence…
The performance of existing permissionless smart contract platforms such as Ethereum is limited by the consensus layer. Prism is a new proof-of-work consensus protocol that provably achieves throughput and latency up to physical limits…