Consensus on Demand

02/08/2022

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by   Jakub Sliwinski, et al.

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Digital money can be implemented efficiently by avoiding consensus. However, no-consensus implementations have drawbacks, as they cannot support smart contracts, and (even more fundamentally) they cannot deal with conflicting transactions. We present a novel protocol that combines the benefits of an asynchronous, broadcast-based digital currency, with the capacity to perform consensus. This is achieved by selectively performing consensus a posteriori, i.e., only when absolutely necessary. Our on-demand consensus comes at the price of restricting the byzantine participants to be less than a one-fifth minority in the system, which we show to be the optimal threshold. We formally prove the correctness of our system and present an open-source implementation, which inherits many features from the Ethereum ecosystem.