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Proofs of Proof-Of-Stake with Sublinear Complexity

Authors Shresth Agrawal , Joachim Neu , Ertem Nusret Tas , Dionysis Zindros

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Author Details

Shresth Agrawal
  • Technische Universität München, Germany
Joachim Neu
  • Stanford University, CA, USA
Ertem Nusret Tas
  • Stanford University, CA, USA
Dionysis Zindros
  • Stanford University, CA, USA

Funding

  • Neu, Joachim: Supported by the Protocol Labs PhD Fellowship.
  • Tas, Ertem Nusret: Supported by the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research.
  • Zindros, Dionysis: Supported in part by funding from Harmony.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Kostis Karantias for the helpful discussions on bisection games, and Daniel Marin for reading early versions of this paper and providing suggestions. The work of JN was conducted in part while at Paradigm. The work of SA was conducted in part while at Common Prefix.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Shresth Agrawal, Joachim Neu, Ertem Nusret Tas, and Dionysis Zindros. Proofs of Proof-Of-Stake with Sublinear Complexity. In 5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 282, pp. 14:1-14:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2023.14

Abstract

Popular Ethereum wallets (like MetaMask) entrust centralized infrastructure providers (e.g., Infura) to run the consensus client logic on their behalf. As a result, these wallets are light-weight and high-performant, but come with security risks. A malicious provider can mislead the wallet by faking payments and balances, or censoring transactions. On the other hand, light clients, which are not in popular use today, allow decentralization, but are concretely inefficient, often with asymptotically linear bootstrapping complexity. This poses a dilemma between decentralization and performance. We design, implement, and evaluate a new proof-of-stake (PoS) superlight client with concretely efficient and asymptotically logarithmic bootstrapping complexity. Our proofs of proof-of-stake (PoPoS) take the form of a Merkle tree of PoS epochs. The verifier enrolls the provers in a bisection game, in which honest provers are destined to win once an adversarial Merkle tree is challenged at sufficient depth. We provide an implementation for mainnet Ethereum: compared to the state-of-the-art light client construction of Ethereum, our client improves time-to-completion by 9×, communication by 180×, and energy usage by 30× (when bootstrapping after 10 years of consensus execution). As an important additional application, our construction can be used to realize trustless cross-chain bridges, in which the superlight client runs within a smart contract and takes the role of an on-chain verifier. We prove our construction is secure and show how to employ it for other PoS systems such as Cardano (with fully adaptive adversary), Algorand, and Snow White.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Security and privacy → Distributed systems security
Keywords
  • Proof-of-stake
  • blockchain
  • light client
  • superlight
  • bridge
  • Ethereum

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