Related papers: Optimal Flexible Consensus and its Application to …
Smart contract platforms facilitate the development of important and diverse distributed applications in a simple manner. This simplicity stems from the inherent utility of employing the state of smart contracts to store, query and verify…
Byzantine fault-tolerant agreement (BFT) in a partially synchronous system usually requires 3f + 1 nodes to tolerate f faulty replicas. Due to their high throughput and finality property BFT algorithms build the core of recent permissioned…
In blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, users compete in a transaction fee auction to get their transactions confirmed in the next block. A line of recent works set forth the desiderata for a "dream" transaction fee mechanism (TFM),…
Security bugs and trapdoors in smart contracts have been impacting the Ethereum community since its inception. Conceptually, the 1.45-million Ethereum's contracts form a single "gigantic program" whose behaviors are determined by the…
The rise of smart contract systems such as Ethereum has resulted in a proliferation of blockchain-based decentralized applications including applications that store and manage a wide range of data. Current smart contracts are designed to be…
Blockchain is a decentralised, immutable ledger technology that has been widely adopted in many sectors for various applications such as cryptocurrencies, smart contracts and supply chain management. Distributed consensus is a fundamental…
Byzantine fault tolerant protocols enable state replication in the presence of crashed, malfunctioning, or actively malicious processes. Designing such protocols without the assistance of verification tools, however, is remarkably…
The LMD GHOST consensus protocol is a critical component of proof-of-stake Ethereum. In its current form, this protocol is brittle, as evidenced by recent attacks and patching attempts. We propose Goldfish, a new protocol that satisfies key…
Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols allow a group of replicas to come to a consensus even when some of the replicas are Byzantine faulty. There exist multiple BFT protocols to securely tolerate an optimal number of faults $t$ under…
A blockchain is a distributed ledger for recording transactions, maintained by many nodes without central authority through a distributed cryptographic protocol. All nodes validate the information to be appended to the blockchain, and a…
The state-of-the-art HotStuff operates an efficient pipeline in which a stable leader drives decisions with linear communication and two round-trips of message. However, the unifying proposing-voting pattern is not sufficient to improve the…
Smart contracts are cryptographic protocols that are enforced without a judiciary. Smart contracts are used occasionally in Bitcoin and are prevalent in Ethereum. Public quantum money improves upon cash we use today, yet the current…
Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) protocols play an important role in blockchains. As the deployment of such systems extends to wide-area networks, the scalability of BFT protocols becomes a critical concern. Optimizations that assign specific…
With the advent of blockchain technologies, the idea of decentralized applications has gained traction. Smart contracts permit the implementation of application logic to foster distributed systems that are capable of removing…
With the advancement of blockchain technology, chained Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols have been increasingly adopted in practical systems, making their performance a crucial aspect of the study. In this paper, we introduce a…
Byzantine consensus is a critical component in many permissioned Blockchains and distributed ledgers. We propose a new paradigm for designing BFT protocols called DQBFT that addresses three major performance and scalability challenges that…
Classic Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols forfeit liveness in the face of asynchrony in order to preserve safety, whereas most deployed blockchain protocols forfeit safety in order to remain live. In this work, we achieve the…
Throughput limitations of existing blockchain architectures are well documented and are one of the most significant hurdles for their wide-spread adoption. In our previous proof-of-concept work, we have shown that separating computation…
Blockchain-based consensus protocols present the opportunity to develop new protocols, due to their novel requirements of open participation and explicit incentivization of participants. To address the first requirement, it is necessary to…
A smart contract that is deployed to a blockchain system like Ethereum is, under reasonable circumstances, expected to be immutable and tamper-proof. This is both a feature (promoting integrity and transparency) and a bug (preventing…