Brick: Asynchronous Incentive-Compatible Payment Channels

Avarikioti, Zeta; Kokoris-Kogias, Eleftherios; Wattenhofer, Roger; Zindros, Dionysis

doi:10.1007/978-3-662-64331-0_11

Cited by 18 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…The efficiency and private execution in AEAs can be coupled with public execution and trustminimising properties of smart contracts. This also has privacy benefits [33] and naturally integrates well with state channel concepts [34].…”

Section: E Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Autonomous Economic Agents as a Second Layer Technology for Blockchains: Framework Introduction and Use-Case Demonstration

Minarsch¹,

Hosseini²,

Favorito³

et al. 2020

2020 Crypto Valley Conference on Blockchain Technology (CVCBT)

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The user experience of interacting with distributed ledger technologies (DLT) is fraught with excessive complexity, high risk and unintuitive processes. Moreover, smart contracts deployed in these systems are restricted to being reactive. These limitations have negative implications on user adoption and prevent DLTs from being general purpose. We introduce a framework for the development of Autonomous Economic Agents (AEAs), software agents that act autonomously and pursue an economic goal, and demonstrate how AEAs complement existing decentralised ledgers as a second layer technology. In particular, the framework enables a simplified user experience through automation, supports modularisation and reuse of complex decision making and machine learning capabilities, and allows for proactive behaviour facilitating autonomy. We demonstrate these gains in the context of a specific use-case, a multi-agent trading system modelling a Walrasian Exchange Economy populated by a number of agents trading a basket of tokens.

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Section: E Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Autonomous Economic Agents as a Second Layer Technology for Blockchains: Framework Introduction and Use-Case Demonstration

Minarsch¹,

Hosseini²,

Favorito³

et al. 2020

2020 Crypto Valley Conference on Blockchain Technology (CVCBT)

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“…To improve blockchain scalability in the context of cryptocurrencies, two approaches emerged: asynchronous on-chain solutions that attempt to create consensus-less blockchain protocols [10,11,18] and off-chain solutions, as channels and channels factories (e.g. [3,7,15,16]), that move the transaction load offline while resorting to a consensus-based blockchain only for trust establishment and dispute resolution.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Frauds are avoided by constantly monitoring the state of the blockchain, in the case the other party tries to close the channel with a state update different from the last one. Interestingly, to limit cooperation failures and frauds, [3] uses a set of 𝑛 processes, called wardens, to proactively validate state updates associated with increasing timestamps agreed by both parties. To get a validation, the buyer needs to contact a full quorum of 𝑡 of wardens, with 𝑡 = 2𝑓 + 1, under the assumption of at most 𝑓 out of the 𝑛 = 3𝑓 + 1 wardens are Byzantine and the non-Byzantine wardens are rational.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Brief Announcement: Breaking the f + 1 Barrier: Executing Payment Transactions in Parallel with Less than f + 1 Validations

Bazzi

Tucci-Piergiovanni

2023

Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

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We consider the problem of supporting payment transactions in an asynchronous system in which up to 𝑓 validators are subject to Byzantine failures under the control of an adaptive adversary. It was shown that this problem can be solved without consensus by using byzantine quorum systems (requiring at least 2𝑓 + 1 validations per transaction in asynchronous systems). We show that it is possible to validate transactions in parallel with less than 𝑓 validations per transaction if each transaction spends no more that a small fraction of a balance. Our solution relies on a novel quorum system that we introduce in this paper and that we call (𝑘 1 , 𝑘 2 )-quorum systems. In the presence of a non-adaptive adversary, these systems can be used to allow up to 𝑘 1 transactions to be validated concurrently and asynchronously but prevent more than 𝑘 2 transactions from being validated. If the adversary is adaptive, these systems can be used to allow 𝑘 1 transaction to be validated and prevent more than 𝑘 ′ 2 > 𝑘 2 transactions from being validated, the difference 𝑘 ′ 2 − 𝑘 2 being dependent on the quorum system's validation slack, which we define in this paper. Using (𝑘 1 , 𝑘 2 )-quorum systems, a payer can execute multiple partial spending transactions to spend a portion of its initial balance with less than full quorum validation (less than 𝑓 validations per transaction) then reclaim any remaining funds using one fully validated transaction, which we call a settlement transaction.

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“…We propose a secure sharding blockchain definition by incorporating security properties outlined in the notable work [6]. Our definition extends the discussion to encompass invalid transaction request processing and introduces atomicity.…”

Section: Security Goalmentioning

confidence: 99%

FleetChain: A Secure Scalable and Responsive Blockchain Achieving Optimal Sharding

Liu

et al. 2020

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Sharding enhances blockchain scalability by dividing the network into shards, each managing specific unspent transaction outputs or accounts. As an introduced new transaction type, cross-shard transactions pose a critical challenge to the security and efficiency of sharding blockchains. Current solutions, however, either prioritize security with assumptions and substantial investments, or focus on reducing overhead and overlooking security considerations.In this paper, we present Kronos, a generic and efficient sharding blockchain consensus ensuring robust security. At the core of Kronos, we introduce a "buffer" mechanism for atomic crossshard transaction processing. Shard members collectively maintain a buffer to manage cross-shard inputs, ensuring that a transaction is committed only if all inputs are available, and no fund is transferred for invalid requests. While ensuring security including atomicity, Kronos processes transactions with optimal intra-shard communication overhead. A valid cross-shard transaction, involving 𝑥 input shards and 𝑦 output shards, is processed with a minimal intra-shard communication overhead factor of 𝑥 + 𝑦. Additionally, we propose a reduction for transaction invalidity proof generation to simple and fast multicasting, leading to atomic rejection without executing full-fledged Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) protocol in optimistic scenarios. Moreover, Kronos adopts a newly designed "batch" mechanism, reducing inter-shard message complexity for cross-shard transactions from O (𝜆) to O ( 𝑚log𝑚 𝑏 𝜆) without sacrificing responsiveness (where 𝑚 denotes number of shards, 𝑏 denotes the batch size of intra-shard consensus, and 𝜆 is security parameter).Kronos operates without dependence on any time or client honesty assumption, serving as a plug-in sharding blockchain consensus supporting applications in diverse network environments including asynchronous ones. We implement Kronos using two prominent BFT protocols: asynchronous Speeding Dumbo (NDSS'22) and partial synchronous HotStuff (PODC'19). Extensive experiments (over up to 1000 AWS EC2 nodes across 4 AWS regions) demonstrate Kronos achieving a substantial throughput of 68.6ktx/sec with 1.7sec latency. Compared with state-of-the-art solutions, Kronos outperforms in all cases, achieving up to a 42× improvement in throughput and a 50% reduction in latency when cross-shard transactions dominate the workload. CCS CONCEPTS• Security and privacy → Distributed systems security.

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Brick: Asynchronous Incentive-Compatible Payment Channels

Cited by 18 publications

References 20 publications

Autonomous Economic Agents as a Second Layer Technology for Blockchains: Framework Introduction and Use-Case Demonstration

Autonomous Economic Agents as a Second Layer Technology for Blockchains: Framework Introduction and Use-Case Demonstration

Brief Announcement: Breaking the f + 1 Barrier: Executing Payment Transactions in Parallel with Less than f + 1 Validations

FleetChain: A Secure Scalable and Responsive Blockchain Achieving Optimal Sharding

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