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Instant Block Confirmation in the Sleepy Model

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12675))

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Abstract

Blockchain protocols suffer from an interesting conundrum: owning stake in the Blockchain doesn’t necessarily mean that the party is willing to participate in day to day operations. This leads to large quantities of stake being owned by parties who do not actually participate in the growth of the blockchain, reducing its security. Pass and Shi [23] captured this concern in the sleepy model, and subsequent work by Pass et al. [5] extended their results into a full Proof of Stake blockchain protocol which can continue to securely progress even when the majority of parties may be offline. However, their protocol requires 10 or more blocks to be added after a transaction first appears in the ledger for it to be confirmed. On the other hand, existing Byzantine Agreement based blockchain protocols such as Algorand [6, 7, 14] confirm transactions as soon as they appear in the ledger, but are unable to progress when users are not online when mandated.

The main question we address is:

Do there exist blockchain protocols which can continue to securely progress even when the majority of parties (resp. stake) may be offline, and confirm transactions as soon as they appear in the ledger?

Our main result shows the answer to this question to be “yes”. We present a Proof of Stake blockchain protocol which continues to securely progress so long as more than half of the online stake is controlled by honest parties, and instantly confirms transactions upon appearance in the ledger.

The authors were supported in part by the NSF award 1916939, a gift from Ripple, a DoE NETL award, a JP Morgan Faculty Fellowship, a PNC center for financial services innovation award, and a Cylab seed funding award.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We were made aware of these works by helpful reviewers.

  2. 2.

    Ignoring the possibility of less than n units of stake being online at all, which we consider to be an extreme corner case.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Vipul Goyal, Hanjun Li & Justin Raizes

  2. NTT Research, Palo Alto, USA

    Vipul Goyal

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  1. Vipul Goyal
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  2. Hanjun Li
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Correspondence to Justin Raizes .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Nikita Borisov

  2. KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Claudia Diaz

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Goyal, V., Li, H., Raizes, J. (2021). Instant Block Confirmation in the Sleepy Model. In: Borisov, N., Diaz, C. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12675. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64331-0_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64331-0_4

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