Related papers: From Permissioned to Proof-of-Stake Consensus
The purpose of a consensus protocol is to keep a distributed network of nodes "in sync," even in the presence of an unpredictable communication network and adversarial behavior by some of the participating nodes. In the permissionless…
Blockchain is a novel technology that is rising a lot of interest in the industrial and re- search sectors because its properties of decentralisation, immutability and data integrity. Initially, the underlying consensus mechanism has been…
Ensuring the correctness of distributed system implementations remains a challenging and largely unaddressed problem. In this paper we present a protocol that can be used to certify the safety of consensus implementations. Our proposed…
The blockchain technology enables mutually untrusting participants to reach consensus on the state of a distributed and decentralized ledger (called a blockchain) in a permissionless setting. The consensus protocol of the blockchain imposes…
Permissionless consensus protocols require a scarce resource to regulate leader election and provide Sybil resistance. Existing paradigms such as Proof of Work and Proof of Stake instantiate this scarcity through parallelizable resources…
Given that Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) are plutocratic, and other common consensus protocols are mostly permission-based, we look for a consensus protocol that will suit the needs of e-Democracy. In particular, what we need…
We introduce a new permissionless blockchain architecture called ABC. ABC is completely asynchronous, and does rely on neither randomness nor proof-of-work. ABC can be parallelized, and transactions have finality within one round trip of…
Distributed architectures are used to improve performance and reliability of various systems. Examples include drone swarms and load-balancing servers. An important capability of a distributed architecture is the ability to reach consensus…
Blockchain protocols typically aspire to run in the permissionless setting, in which nodes are owned and operated by a large number of diverse and unknown entities, with each node free to start or stop running the protocol at any time. This…
Recently a new fault tolerant and simple mechanism was designed for solving commit consensus problem. It is based on replicated validation of messages sent between transaction participants and a special dispatcher validator manager node.…
Most modern asset transfer systems use consensus to maintain a totally ordered chain of transactions. It was recently shown that consensus is not always necessary for implementing asset transfer. More efficient, asynchronous solutions can…
Modern distributed systems rely on consensus protocols to build a fault-tolerant-core upon which they can build applications. Consensus protocols are correct under a specific failure model, where up to $f$ machines can fail. We argue that…
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…
Fault-tolerant distributed systems move the trust in a single party to a majority of parties participating in the protocol. This makes blockchain based crypto-currencies possible: they allow parties to agree on a total order of transactions…
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.…
Byzantine fault tolerant protocols enable state replication in the presence of crashed, malfunctioning, or actively malicious processes. Designing such protocols without the assistance of verification tools, however, is remarkably…
Multiparty session types are designed to abstractly capture the structure of communication protocols and verify behavioural properties. One important such property is progress, i.e., the absence of deadlock. Distributed algorithms often…
This paper presents a study of the Poof-of-Stake (PoW) Ethereum consensus protocol, following the recent switch from Proof-of-Work (PoS) to Proof-of-Stake within Merge upgrade. The new protocol has resulted in reduced energy consumption and…
Graph state verification protocols allow multiple parties to share a graph state while checking that the state is honestly prepared, even in the presence of malicious parties. Since graph states are the starting point of numerous quantum…
This paper introduces a family of leaderless Byzantine fault tolerance protocols, built around a metastable mechanism via network subsampling. These protocols provide a strong probabilistic safety guarantee in the presence of Byzantine…