Technology
Aleph Zero’s Peer-Reviewed Paper is Now Online
Aug 21, 2019
AI Summary
Just a couple of days ago we shared the news about our new protocol technical paper being peer-reviewed.
Today, our awesome research team — Adam Gagol, Damian Lesniak, Damian Straszak, and Michal Swietek—published it on arXiv. Go ahead, check it out here!
Here’s the abstract:
The spectacular success of Bitcoin and Blockchain Technology in recent years has provided enough evidence that widespread adoption of a common cryptocurrency system is not merely a distant vision, but a scenario that might come true in the near future.
However, the presence of Bitcoin’s obvious shortcomings such as excessive electricity consumption, unsatisfying transaction throughput, and large validation time (latency) makes it clear that a new, more efficient system is needed. We propose a protocol in which a set of nodes maintains and updates a linear ordering of transactions that are being submitted by users.
Virtually every cryptocurrency system has such a protocol at its core, and it is the efficiency of this protocol that determines the overall throughput and latency of the system. We develop our protocol on the grounds of the well-established field of Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (ABFT) systems. This allows us to formally reason about correctness, efficiency, and security in the strictest possible model, and thus convincingly prove the overall robustness of our solution. Our protocol improves upon the state-of-the-art HoneyBadgerBFT by Miller et al. by reducing the asymptotic latency while matching the optimal communication complexity.
Furthermore, in contrast to the above, our protocol does not require a trusted dealer thanks to a novel implementation of a trustless ABFT Randomness Beacon.
Our authors would like to thank Matthew Niemerg for introducing the team to the topic, constant support, and countless hours spent on valuable discussions.
Additionally, we would like to show our gratitude to Michał Handzlik, Tomasz Kisielewki, Maciej Gawron, and Łukasz Lachowski, for reading the paper, proposing changes that improved its consistency and readability, and discussions that helped us to make the paper easier to understand.
