Paper 2022/1571 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2022/1571 ↗
Practical Settlement Bounds for Longest-Chain Consensus
Abstract
Nakamoto's longest-chain consensus paradigm now powers the bulk of the world's cryptocurrencies and distributed finance infrastructure. An emblematic property of longest-chain consensus is that it provides probabilistic settlement guarantees that strengthen over time. This makes the exact relationship between settlement error and settlement latency a critical aspect of the protocol that both users and system designers must understand to make informed decisions. A recent line of work has finally provided a satisfactory rigorous accounting of this relationship for proof-of-work longest-chain protocols, but those techniques do not appear to carry over to the proof-of-stake setting. This article develops a new analytic approach for establishing such settlement guarantees that yields explicit, rigorous settlement bounds for proof-of-stake longest-chain protocols, placing them on equal footing with their proof-of-work counterparts. Our techniques apply with some adaptations to the proof-of-work setting where they provide improvements to the state-of-the-art settlement bounds for proof-of-work protocols.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
PDF- Category
- Cryptographic protocols
- Publication info
- Preprint.
- History
- 2025-05-02: last updated
- 2022-11-11: published
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2022/1571
- License
- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/1571,
author = {Peter Gaži and Ling Ren and Alexander Russell},
title = {Practical Settlement Bounds for Longest-Chain Consensus},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2022/1571},
year = {2022},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1571}
}