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A Circuit Approach to Constructing Blockchains on Blockchains

Authors Ertem Nusret Tas , David Tse , Yifei Wang

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Author Details

Ertem Nusret Tas
  • Stanford University, CA, USA
David Tse
  • Stanford University, CA, USA
Yifei Wang
  • Stanford University, CA, USA

Funding

This research was funded by a Research Hub Collaboration agreement with Input Output Global Inc.
  • Tas, Ertem Nusret: Supported by the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research.

Acknowledgements

We thank Dionysis Zindros for several insightful discussions on this project. This paper and the concurrent related work in which blockchains were analyzed as "virtual parties" [Dionysis Zindros et al., 2024] both came out of many fruitful discussions about blockchain composability among Ertem Nusret Tas, David Tse, Yifei Wang and Dionysis Zindros, when they were all at Stanford University.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Ertem Nusret Tas, David Tse, and Yifei Wang. A Circuit Approach to Constructing Blockchains on Blockchains. In 6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 316, pp. 8:1-8:25, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.8

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of blockchains, each with an open ledger that anyone can read from and write to. In this multi-chain world, an important question emerges: how can we build a more secure overlay blockchain by reading from and writing to a given set of blockchains? Drawing an analogy with switching circuits, we approach the problem by defining two basic compositional operations between blockchains, serial and triangular compositions, and use these operations as building blocks to construct general overlay blockchains. Under the partially synchronous setting, we have the following results: 1) the serial composition, between two certificate-producing blockchains, yields an overlay blockchain that is safe if at least one of the two underlay blockchains is safe and that is live if both of them are live; 2) the triangular composition between three blockchains, akin to parallel composition of switching circuits, yields an overlay blockchain that is safe if all underlay blockchains are safe and that is live if over half of them are live; 3) repeated composition of these two basic operations can yield all possible tradeoffs of safety and liveness for an overlay blockchain built on an arbitrary number of underlay chains. The results are also extended to the synchronous setting.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Security and privacy → Distributed systems security
Keywords
  • interchain consensus protocols
  • serial composition
  • triangular composition
  • circuits

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