Related papers: On the Limits of Consensus under Dynamic Availabil…

There exists a plethora of consensus protocols in literature. The reason is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, since every protocol is unique and its performance is directly tied to the deployment settings and workload…

The blockchain initially gained traction in 2008 as the technology underlying bitcoin, but now has been employed in a diverse range of applications and created a global market worth over $150B as of 2017. What distinguishes blockchains from…

Existing permissioned blockchain systems designate a fixed and explicit group of committee nodes to run a consensus protocol that confirms the same sequence of blocks among all nodes. Unfortunately, when such a permissioned blockchain runs…

Distributed consensus is a key enabler for many distributed systems including distributed databases and blockchains. Canopus is a scalable distributed consensus protocol that ensures that live nodes in a system agree on an ordered sequence…

Censorship resistance with short-term inclusion guarantees is an important feature of decentralized systems, missing from many state-of-the-art and even deployed consensus protocols. In leader-based protocols the leader arbitrarily selects…

Ethereum represents new innovation in the fields of cryptocurrency which has become relatively stagnate, promising many things, including an entire programming language and development enviroment built into the network. However the current…

SURFACE, standing for Secure, Use-case adaptive, and Relatively Fork-free Approach of Chain Extension, is a consensus algorithm that is designed for real-world networks and enjoys the benefits from both the Nakamoto consensus and Byzantine…

Blockchain technologies originate from cryptocurrencies. Thus, most blockchain technologies assume an environment with a fast and stable network. However, in some blockchain-based systems, e.g., supply chain management (SCM) systems, some…

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…

Consensus is unnecessary when the truth is available. In this paper, we present a new perspective of rebuilding the blockchain without consensus. When the consensus phase is eliminated from a blockchain, transactions could be canonized…

Byzantine Consensus is fundamental for building consistent and fault-tolerant distributed systems. In traditional quorum-based consensus protocols, quorums are defined using globally known assumptions shared among all participants.…

The blockchain data structure maintained via the longest-chain rule---popularized by Bitcoin---is a powerful algorithmic tool for consensus algorithms. Such algorithms achieve consistency for blocks in the chain as a function of their depth…

This paper investigates under which conditions information can be reliably shared and consensus can be solved in unknown and anonymous message-passing networks that suffer from crash-failures. We provide algorithms to emulate registers and…

Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols have provable safety and liveness properties for static validator sets. In practice, however, the validator set changes over time, potentially eroding the protocol's security guarantees. For…

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…

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…

The distributed transaction commit problem requires reaching agreement on whether a transaction is committed or aborted. The classic Two-Phase Commit protocol blocks if the coordinator fails. Fault-tolerant consensus algorithms also reach…

Decentralization is a fundamental design element of the Web3 economy. Blockchains and distributed consensus mechanisms are touted as fault-tolerant, attack-resistant, and collusion-proof because they are decentralized. Recent analyses,…

Blockchain systems are challenged by the so-called Trilemma tradeoff: decentralization, scalability and security. Infrastructure and node configuration, choice of the Consensus Protocol and complexity of the application transactions are…

Consensus protocols inherently rely on the notion of leader election, in which one or a subset of participants are temporarily elected to authorize and announce the network's latest state. While leader election is a well studied problem,…