Related papers: A Fast Confirmation Rule (aka Fast Synchronous Fin…
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…
Ethereum's current Gasper consensus mechanism, which combines the Latest Message Driven Greediest Heaviest Observed SubTree (LMD-GHOST) fork choice rule with the probabilistic Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG) finality overlay,…
While Ethereum has successfully achieved dynamic availability together with safety, a fundamental delay remains between transaction execution and immutable finality. In Ethereum's current Gasper protocol, this latency is on the order of 15…
Currently, Gasper, the implemented consensus protocol of Ethereum, takes between 64 and 95 slots to finalize blocks. Because of that, a significant portion of the chain is susceptible to reorgs. The possibility to capture MEV (Maximum…
Blockchain offers a decentralized, immutable, transparent system of records. It offers a peer-to-peer network of nodes with no centralised governing entity making it unhackable and therefore, more secure than the traditional paper-based or…
There exist many forms of Blockchain finality conditions, from deterministic to probabilistic terminations. To favor availability against consistency in the face of partitions, most blockchains only offer probabilistic eventual finality:…
Many of today's crypto currencies use blockchains as decentralized ledgers and secure them with proof of work. In case of a fork of the chain, Bitcoin's rule for achieving consensus is selecting the longest chain and discarding the other…
Ethereum Research team has proposed a family of Casper blockchain consensus protocols for Ethereum 2.0. It has been shown in the literature that Casper Friendly Finality Gadget (Casper FFG) for Ethereum 2.0's beacon network cannot achieve…
The CAP theorem says that no blockchain can be live under dynamic participation and safe under temporary network partitions. To resolve this availability-finality dilemma, we formulate a new class of flexible consensus protocols,…
Longest-chain blockchain protocols, such as Bitcoin, guarantee liveness even when the number of actively participating users is variable, i.e., they are adaptive. However, they are not safe under network partitions, i.e., they do not…
Motivated by proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains such as Ethereum, two key desiderata have recently been studied for Byzantine-fault tolerant (BFT) state-machine replication (SMR) consensus protocols: Finality means that the protocol retains…
Classic BFT consensus protocols guarantee safety and liveness for all clients if fewer than one-third of replicas are faulty. However, in applications such as high-value payments, some clients may want to prioritize safety over liveness.…
We study financial transaction confirmation finality in Bitcoin as a function of transaction amount and user risk tolerance. A transaction is recorded in a block on a blockchain. However, a transaction may be revoked due to a fork in the…
Blockchain is a type of decentralized distributed network which acts as an immutable digital ledger. Despite the absence of any central governing authority to validate the blocks in the ledger, it is considered secure and immutable due to…
First-generation blockchains provide probabilistic finality: a block can be revoked, albeit the probability decreases as the block sinks deeper into the chain. Recent proposals revisited committee-based BFT consensus to provide…
Transaction throughput, confirmation latency and confirmation reliability are fundamental performance measures of any blockchain system in addition to its security. In a decentralized setting, these measures are limited by two underlying…
The DFINITY blockchain computer provides a secure, performant and flexible consensus mechanism. At its core, DFINITY contains a decentralized randomness beacon which acts as a verifiable random function (VRF) that produces a stream of…
There has been recently a lot of progress in designing efficient partially synchronous BFT consensus protocols that are meant to serve as core consensus engines for Proof of Stake blockchain systems. While the state-of-the-art solutions…
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…
Modern cryptocurrency systems, such as Ethereum, permit complex financial transactions through scripts called smart contracts. These smart contracts are executed many, many times, always without real concurrency. First, all smart contracts…