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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 present Egalitarian BFT (EBFT), a simple and high-performance framework of BFT consensus protocols for decentralized systems like blockchains. The key innovation in EBFT is egalitarian block generation: nodes randomly and…
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…
Despite the tremendous interest in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum today, many aspects of the underlying consensus protocols are poorly understood. Therefore, the search for protocols that improve either throughput or security…
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:…
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…
Modern public blockchains like Ethereum rely on p2p networks to run distributed and censorship-resistant applications. With its wide adoption, it operates as a highly critical public ledger. On its transition to become more scalable and…
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…
Most of the Blockchain permissioned systems employ Byzantine fault-tolerance (BFT) consensus protocols to ensure that honest validators agree on the order for appending entries to their ledgers. In this paper, we study the performance and…
Sharding is a promising blockchain scaling solution. But it currently suffers from high latency and low throughput when it comes to cross-shard transactions, i.e., transactions that require coordination from multiple shards. The root cause…
Low transaction throughput and poor scalability are significant issues in public blockchain consensus protocols such as Bitcoins. Recent research efforts in this direction have proposed shard-based consensus protocols where the key idea is…
Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols for dynamically available systems face a critical challenge: balancing latency and security in fluctuating node participation. Existing solutions often require multiple rounds of voting per…
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…
Centralized version control systems (VCS) are vital for software development but pose risks of data loss and ownership disputes. While blockchain offers a decentralized alternative, existing solutions are often hindered by high latency,…
This paper examines how various categories of Ethereum stakers respond to changes in the consensus issuance schedule, and the potential impact of such changes on the composition of the staking market. To this end, we have develop and…
Tendermint-core blockchains (e.g. Cosmos) are considered today one of the most viable alternatives for the highly energy consuming proof-of-work blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Their particularity is that they aim at offering…
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…
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 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…
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…