DFINITY Technology Overview Series, Consensus System

By T. Hanke, Mahnush Movahedi, Dominic Williams. arXiv.org, 2018

317 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The DFINITY blockchain computer provides a secure, performant and flexible consensus mechanism. At its core, DFINITY contains a decentralized randomness beacon which acts as a verifiable random function (VRF) that produces a stream of outputs over time. The novel technique behind the beacon relies on the existence of a unique-deterministic, non-interactive, DKG-friendly threshold signatures scheme. The only known examples of such a scheme are pairing-based and derived from BLS. The DFINITY blockchain is layered on top of the DFINITY beacon and uses the beacon as its source of randomness for leader selection and leader ranking. A "weight" is attributed to a chain based on the ranks of the leaders who propose the blocks in the chain, and that weight is used to select between competing chains. The DFINITY blockchain is layered on top of the DFINITY beacon and uses the beacon as its source of randomness for leader selection and leader ranking blockchain is further hardened by a notarization process which dramatically improves the time to finality and eliminates the nothing-at-stake and selfish mining attacks. DFINITY consensus algorithm is made to scale through continuous quorum selections driven by the random beacon. In practice, DFINITY achieves block times of a few seconds and transaction finality after only two confirmations. The system gracefully handles temporary losses of network synchrony including network splits, while it is provably secure under synchrony.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5f528f6d7069a263fa198a2bc3ca3cd74c4e96cf

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Citations in the corpus

Monoxide: Scale out Blockchains with Asynchronous Consensus Zones (2019, unknown): “For example, Algorand is susceptible to bias in the randomness of the variable random function (VRF) invocation [20], while ByzCoin may not reach the agreement on the committee election, as reported in the hybrid consensus system [38].”
HotStuff: BFT Consensus with Linearity and Responsiveness (2019, background): “As described above, recent blockchain solutions hybridize Proof-of-Work solutions with classical BFT solutions in various ways [7, 17, 26, 29, 31, 33, 42].”
RapidChain: Scaling Blockchain via Full Sharding (2018, methodology): “To solve the biased coin problem, D nity[33] propose a new VRF protocol based on non-interactive threshold signature scheme with uniqueness property.”