Related papers: Snowman for partial synchrony
The Algorand blockchain is a secure and decentralized public ledger based on pure proof of stake rather than proof of work. At its core it is a novel consensus protocol with exactly one block certified in each round: that is, the protocol…
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…
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…
This document describes a new consensus algorithm which is asynchronous and uses gossip based message dissemination between nodes. The current version of the algorithm does not cover the case of a node failure or significantly delayed…
Ethereum clients execute transactions in a sequential order prescribed by the consensus protocol. This is a safe and conservative approach to blockchain transaction processing which forgoes running transactions in parallel even when doing…
In this paper we propose Aleph, a leaderless, fully asynchronous, Byzantine fault tolerant consensus protocol for ordering messages exchanged among processes. It is based on a distributed construction of a partially ordered set and the…
The blockchain paradigm provides a mechanism for content dissemination and distributed consensus on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. While this paradigm has been widely adopted in industry, it has not been carefully analyzed in terms of its…
Consensus protocols are crucial for a blockchain system as they are what allow agreement between the system's nodes in a potentially adversarial environment. For this reason, it is paramount to ensure their correct design and implementation…
This paper introduces a novel, fast atomic-snapshot protocol for asynchronous message-passing systems. In the process of defining what ``fast'' means exactly, we spot a few interesting issues that arise when conventional time metrics are…
As the cornerstone of blockchain, block synchronization plays a vital role in maintaining the security. Without full blockchain synchronization, unexpected forks will emerge and thus providing a breeding ground for various malicious…
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…
We consider distributed plurality consensus in a complete graph of size $n$ with $k$ initial opinions. We design an efficient and simple protocol in the asynchronous communication model that ensures that all nodes eventually agree on the…
A Confirmation Rule, within blockchain networks, refers to an algorithm implemented by network nodes that determines (either probabilistically or deterministically) the permanence of certain blocks on the blockchain. An example of…
Crosschain communications allows information to be communicated between blockchains. Consensus in the context of crosschain communications relates to how participants on one blockchain are convinced of the state of a remote blockchain. It…
An emerging blockchain protocol design pattern leverages the asymmetry between the computational effort in performing versus verifying tasks. For example, cryptographic validity proofs (e.g., SNARKS) require the prover to expend significant…
Blockchain as a promising technology is gaining its popularity ever since proof-of-work based Bitcoin came to the world. Nevertheless, Bitcoin achieves consensus at an expensive cost of energy. Proof-of-stake is one of the solutions for…
Blockchain technology enables stakeholders to conduct trusted data sharing and exchange without a trusted centralized institution. These features make blockchain applications attractive to enhance trustworthiness in very different contexts.…
Each application developer desires to provide its users with consistent results and an always-available system despite failures. Boldly, the CALM theorem disagrees. It states that it is hard to design a system that is both consistent and…
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…
Randomized fault-tolerant consensus protocols with common coins are widely used in cloud computing and blockchain platforms. Due to their fundamental role, it is vital to guarantee their correctness. Threshold automata is a formal model…