Related papers: A Fast Confirmation Rule (aka Fast Synchronous Fin…
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…
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…
Ethereum has undergone a recent change called \textit{the Merge}, which made Ethereum a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, shifting closer to BFT consensus. Ethereum, which wished to keep the best of the two protocol designs (BFT and…
To implement a blockchain, the trend is now to integrate a non-trivial Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithm instead of the seminal idea of waiting to receive blocks to decide upon the longest branch. After a decade of existence,…
Bitcoin is currently subject to a significant pay-for-speed trade-off. This is caused by lengthy and highly variable transaction confirmation times, especially during times of congestion. Users can reduce their transaction confirmation…
We make several contributions that quantify the real-time hash rate and therefore the consensus of a blockchain. We show that by using only the hash value of blocks, we can estimate and measure the hash rate of all miners or individual…
Many prominent smart-contract applications such as payment channels, auctions, and voting systems often involve a mechanism in which some party must respond to a challenge or appeal some action within a fixed time limit. This pattern of…
An effective method for suppressing intentional forks in a blockchain is the last-generated rule, which selects the most recent chain as the main chain in the event of a chain tie. This rule helps invalidate blocks that are withheld by…
Bitcoin's consensus rules are encoded in the implementation of its reference client: "The code is the spec." Yet this code is unsuitable for formal verification due to side effects, mutable state, concurrency, and legacy design. A…
Blockchains are distributed secure ledgers to which transactions are issued continuously and each block of transactions is tightly coupled to its predecessors. Permissioned blockchains place special emphasis on transactions throughput. In…
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…
Despite the success in various scenarios, blockchain systems, especially EVM-compatible ones that serially execute transactions, still face the significant challenge of limited throughput. Concurrent transaction execution is a promising…
Blockchain is a decentralized, distributed ledger technology that ensures transparency, security, and immutability through cryptographic techniques. However, advancements in quantum computing threaten the security of classical cryptographic…
Achieving low-latency consensus in geographically distributed systems remains a key challenge for blockchain and distributed database applications. To this end, there has been significant recent interest in State-Machine-Replication (SMR)…
We study the probabilistic distribution of the confirmation time of Bitcoin transactions, conditional on the current memory pool (i.e., the queue of transactions awaiting confirmation). The results of this paper are particularly interesting…
A key performance metric in blockchains is the latency between when a transaction is broadcast and when it is confirmed (the so-called, confirmation latency). While improvements in consensus techniques can lead to lower confirmation…
Blockchain consensus is a state whereby each node in a network agrees on the current state of the blockchain. Existing protocols achieve consensus via a contest or voting procedure to select one node as a dictator to propose new blocks.…
This paper presents Conflux, a fast, scalable and decentralized blockchain system that optimistically process concurrent blocks without discarding any as forks. The Conflux consensus protocol represents relationships between blocks as a…
A large number of consensus algorithms have been proposed. However, the requirement of strict consistency limits their wide adoption, especially in high-performance required systems. In this paper, we propose a weak consensus algorithm that…
In the area of blockchain, numerous methods have been proposed for suppressing intentional forks by attackers more effectively than the random rule. However, all of them, except for the random rule, require major updates, rely on a trusted…