10 research outputs found
Ethereum: state of knowledge and research perspectives
Ethereum is a decentralized application platform that allows users to write, deploy, and interact with smart contracts -- programs that encode financial agreements. A peer-to-peer network of mutually distrusting nodes maintains a common view of the state of all accounts and executes smart contracts' code upon request. The global state is stored in a blockchain secured by a proof-of-work consensus mechanism similar to that in Bitcoin. The core value proposition of Ethereum is a Turing-complete programming language that enables implementing complex logic in smart contracts.
Decentralized applications without a trusted third party are appealing in many areas, such as financial services, crowdfunding, and gambling. Smart contracts as a research topic contains many unsolved challenges and spans over areas ranging from cryptography, consensus algorithms, and programming languages to governance, ethical, and legal issues.
This paper is the first to summarize the state of knowledge in this field. We provide a technical overview of Ethereum and outline open challenges along with proposed solutions. We also mention alternative blockchains with Turing complete programming capabilities
Ethereum: state of knowledge and research perspectives
Ethereum is a decentralized application platform that allows users to write, deploy, and interact with smart contracts -- programs that encode financial agreements. A peer-to-peer network of mutually distrusting nodes maintains a common view of the state of all accounts and executes smart contracts' code upon request. The global state is stored in a blockchain secured by a proof-of-work consensus mechanism similar to that in Bitcoin. The core value proposition of Ethereum is a Turing-complete programming language that enables implementing complex logic in smart contracts.
Decentralized applications without a trusted third party are appealing in many areas, such as financial services, crowdfunding, and gambling. Smart contracts as a research topic contains many unsolved challenges and spans over areas ranging from cryptography, consensus algorithms, and programming languages to governance, ethical, and legal issues.
This paper is the first to summarize the state of knowledge in this field. We provide a technical overview of Ethereum and outline open challenges along with proposed solutions. We also mention alternative blockchains with Turing complete programming capabilities
PolyShard: Coded Sharding Achieves Linearly Scaling Efficiency and Security Simultaneously
Today’s blockchains do not scale in a meaningful sense. As more nodes join the system, the efficiency of the system (computation, communication, and storage) degrades, or at best stays constant. A leading idea for enabling blockchains to scale efficiency is the notion of sharding: different subsets of nodes handle different portions of the blockchain, thereby reducing the load for each individual node. However, existing sharding proposals achieve efficiency scaling by compromising on trust - corrupting the nodes in a given shard will lead to the permanent loss of the corresponding portion of data. We observe that sharding is similar to replication coding, which is known to be inefficient and fragile in the coding theory community. In this paper, we demonstrate a new protocol for coded storage and computation in blockchains. In particular, we propose PolyShard: “polynomially coded sharding” scheme that achieves information-theoretic upper bounds on the efficiency of the storage, system throughput, as well as on trust, thus enabling a truly scalable system. We provide simulation results that numerically demonstrate the performance improvement over state of the arts, and the scalability of the PolyShard system. Finally, we discuss potential enhancements, and highlight practical considerations in building such a system
A Survey of Layer-Two Blockchain Protocols
After the success of the Bitcoin blockchain, came several cryptocurrencies
and blockchain solutions in the last decade. Nonetheless, Blockchain-based
systems still suffer from low transaction rates and high transaction processing
latencies, which hinder blockchains' scalability. An entire class of solutions,
called Layer-1 scalability solutions, have attempted to incrementally improve
such limitations by adding/modifying fundamental blockchain attributes.
Recently, a completely different class of works, called Layer-2 protocols, have
emerged to tackle the blockchain scalability issues using unconventional
approaches. Layer-2 protocols improve transaction processing rates, periods,
and fees by minimizing the use of underlying slow and costly blockchains. In
fact, the main chain acts just as an instrument for trust establishment and
dispute resolution among Layer-2 participants, where only a few transactions
are dispatched to the main chain. Thus, Layer-2 blockchain protocols have the
potential to transform the domain. However, rapid and discrete developments
have resulted in diverse branches of Layer-2 protocols. In this work, we
systematically create a broad taxonomy of such protocols and implementations.
We discuss each Layer-2 protocol class in detail and also elucidate their
respective approaches, salient features, requirements, etc. Moreover, we
outline the issues related to these protocols along with a comparative
discussion. Our thorough study will help further systematize the knowledge
dispersed in the domain and help the readers to better understand the field of
Layer-2 protocols.Comment: 21 pages, 15 figures, 2 table
Capabilities and Limitations of Payment Channel Networks for Blockchain Scalability
L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen
Parallel Chains: Improving Throughput and Latency of Blockchain Protocols via Parallel Composition
Two of the most significant challenges in the design of blockchain
protocols is increasing their transaction processing throughput and
minimising latency in terms of transaction settlement. In this work
we put forth for the first time a formal execution model that
enables to express transaction throughput while supporting formal
security arguments regarding safety and liveness. We then introduce
parallel-chains, a simple yet powerful non-black-box
composition technique for blockchain protocols. We showcase our
technique by providing two parallel-chains protocol variants, one
for the PoS and one for PoW setting, that exhibit optimal throughput
under adaptive fail-stop corruptions while they retain
their resiliency in the face of Byzantine adversity assuming honest
majority of stake or computational power, respectively. We also apply
our parallel-chains composition method to improve settlement
latency; combining parallel composition with a novel transaction
weighing mechanism we show that it is possible to scale down
the time required for a transaction to settle by any given constant
while maintaining the same level of security