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Blockchain enables peer-to-peer transactions in cyberspace without a trusted third party. The rapid growth of Ethereum and smart contract blockchains generally calls for well-designed Transaction Fee Mechanisms (TFMs) to allocate limited…
Low latency is one of the desired properties for partially synchronous Byzantine consensus protocols. Previous protocols have achieved consensus with just two communication steps either by reducing the bound on the number of faults the…
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…
We consider the problem of varying the security of blockchain transactions according to their importance. This adaptive security is achieved by using variable size consensus committees. To improve performance, such committees function…
We present Carnot, a leader-based Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocol that is responsive and operates under the partially synchronous model. Responsive BFT consensus protocols exhibit wire-speed operation and deliver…
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,…
Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) systems are considered by the systems research community to be state of the art with regards to providing reliability in distributed systems. BFT systems provide safety and liveness guarantees with reasonable…
We formulate the design of a threshold signature scheme as made possible on cryptocurrency protocols like Bitcoin. The funds are secured by an m-of-n threshold signature, where at least m signatures are needed to unlock the funds. A user…
The problem of Byzantine consensus has been key to designing secure distributed systems. However, it is particularly difficult, mainly due to the presence of Byzantine processes that act arbitrarily and the unknown message delays in general…
Despite the advantages of decentralization and immutability, blockchain technology faces significant scalability and throughput limitations, which has prompted the exploration of off-chain solutions like payment channels. Adaptor signatures…
The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the emergence of decentralized Clinical Trials (DCTs) due to patient retention, accelerate trials, improve data accessibility, enable virtual care, and facilitate seamless communication through integrated…
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…
A critical component of any blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform is the consensus algorithm. Blockchain consensus algorithms are the primary vehicle for the nodes within a blockchain network to reach an agreement. In…
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…
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…
Numerous distributed tasks have to be handled in a setting where a fraction of nodes behaves Byzantine, that is, deviates arbitrarily from the intended protocol. Resilient, deterministic protocols rely on the detection of majorities to…
In a practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) blockchain network, the voting nodes may always leave the network while some new nodes can also enter the network, thus the number of voting nodes is constantly changing. Such a new PBFT with…
Since the inception of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology have attracted an increasing interest from both academia and industry. Among various core components, consensus protocol is the defining technology…
Smart contracts are stateful programs deployed on blockchains; they secure over a trillion dollars in transaction value per year. High-stakes smart contracts often rely on timely alerts about external events, but prior work has not analyzed…
In this paper we present an open source, fully asynchronous, leaderless algorithm for reaching consensus in the presence of Byzantine faults in an asynchronous network. We prove the algorithm's correctness provided that less than a third of…