Scaling Blockchains: Can Elected Committees Help?

10/16/2021
by   Alon Benhaim, et al.
0

In the high-stakes race to develop more scalable blockchains, some platforms (Cosmos, EOS, TRON, etc.) have adopted committee-based consensus protocols, whereby the blockchain's record-keeping rights are entrusted to a committee of elected block producers. In theory, the smaller the committee, the faster the blockchain can reach consensus and the more it can scale. What's less clear, is whether this mechanism ensures that honest committees can be consistently elected, given voters typically have limited information. Using EOS' Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) protocol as a backdrop, we show that identifying the optimal voting strategy is complex and practically out of reach. We empirically characterize some simpler (suboptimal) voting strategies that token holders resort to in practice and show that these nonetheless converge to optimality, exponentially quickly. This yields efficiency gains over other PoS protocols that rely on randomized block producer selection. Our results suggest that (elected) committee-based consensus, as implemented in DPoS, can be robust and efficient, despite its complexity.

READ FULL TEXT
research
03/11/2019

Weighted Voting on the Blockchain: Improving Consensus in Proof of Stake Protocols

Proof of Stake (PoS) protocols rely on voting mechanisms to reach consen...
research
11/10/2017

Consensus in the Age of Blockchains

The blockchain initially gained traction in 2008 as the technology under...
research
09/18/2019

Introduction to the Tezos Blockchain

Tezos is an innovative blockchain that improves on several aspects compa...
research
01/14/2023

Evaluating Permissioned Blockchain Using Stochastic Modeling and Chaos Engineering

Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies rely on distributed conse...
research
03/22/2021

The quest for scaling BFT Consensus through Tree-Based Vote Aggregation

With the growing commercial interest in blockchain, permissioned impleme...
research
06/10/2020

Efficient democratic decisions via nondeterministic proportional consensus

Are there voting methods which (i) give everyone, including minorities, ...
research
04/07/2019

Committee Selection is More Similar Than You Think: Evidence from Avalanche and Stellar

Increased interest in scalable and high-throughput blockchains has led t...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset