Related papers: On the Limits of Consensus under Dynamic Availabil…
Consensus is fundamental for distributed systems since it underpins key functionalities of such systems ranging from distributed information fusion, decision-making, to decentralized control. In order to reach an agreement, existing…
The blockchain has found numerous applications in many areas with the expectation to significantly enhance their security. The Internet of things (IoT) constitutes a prominent application domain of blockchain, with a number of architectures…
The success of blockchain as the underlying technology for cryptocurrencies has opened up possibilities for its use in other application domains as well. The main advantages of blockchain for its potential use in other domains are its…
In the field of distributed consensus and blockchains, the synchronous communication model assumes that all messages between honest parties are delayed at most by a known constant $\Delta$. Recent literature establishes that the…
Cooperation is fundamental for human prosperity. Blockchain, as a trust machine, is a cooperative institution in cyberspace that supports cooperation through distributed trust with consensus protocols. While studies in computer science…
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…
Longest-chain blockchain protocols, such as Bitcoin, guarantee liveness even when the number of actively participating users is variable, i.e., they are adaptive. However, they are not safe under network partitions, i.e., they do not…
Blockchains require deterministic execution in order to reach consensus. This is often guaranteed in languages designed to write smart contracts, such as Solidity. Application-specific blockchains or ``appchains'' allow the blockchain…
In distributed systems, a group of $\textit{learners}$ achieve $\textit{consensus}$ when, by observing the output of some $\textit{acceptors}$, they all arrive at the same value. Consensus is crucial for ordering transactions in…
Distributed algorithms solving agreement problems like consensus or state machine replication are essential components of modern fault-tolerant distributed services. They are also notoriously hard to understand and reason about. Their…
This paper presents new classes of consensus protocols with fixed-time convergence, which enable the definition of an upper bound for consensus state as a parameter of the consensus protocol, ensuring its independence from the initial…
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…
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…
Blockchain adoption is reaching an all-time high, with a plethora of blockchain architectures being developed to cover the needs of applications eager to integrate blockchain into their operations. However, blockchain systems suffer from…
Blockchain consensus protocols enable participants to agree on consistent views of the blockchain that may be ahead or behind relative to each other but do not fork into different chains. A number of recently popular…
Consensus protocols used today in blockchains often rely on computational power or financial stakes - scarce resources. We propose a novel protocol using social capital - trust and influence from social interactions - as a non-transferable…
This paper addresses the problem of resilient consensus in the presence of misbehaving nodes. Although it is typical to assume knowledge of at least some nonlocal information when studying secure and fault-tolerant consensus algorithms,…
Public blockchains should be able to scale with respect to the number of nodes and to the transactions workload. The blockchain scalability trilemma has been informally conjectured. This is related to scalability, security and…
DAG-based BFT consensus has attracted growing interest in distributed data management systems for consistent replication in untrusted settings due to its high throughput and resilience to asynchrony. However, existing protocols still suffer…
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…