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StakeNote: A Proof-Of-Stake Protocol for CryptoNote Payments

Authors Bernardo David , Dimitris Karakostas

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ACM Subject Classification
  • Security and privacy
Keywords
  • Proof-of-Stake
  • anonymity
  • CryptoNote
  • ring signatures

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Abstract

This work proposes StakeNote, a distributed ledger protocol that combines Proof-of-Stake (PoS) with privacy and anonymity preserving payments. The protocol combines Ouroboros Praos, a provably secure PoS protocol, with CryptoNote, a privacy-preserving payment system based on ring signatures which has been widely used in practice. We prove that StakeNote inherits the security guarantees of Ouroboros Praos and the privacy guarantees of CryptoNote. We also demonstrate its practicality via a proof of concept implementation of its cryptographic components, showing that block signing requires less than 25 ms and eligibility proofs are approx. 3 KB for anonymity sets of size 16. Finally, we discuss heuristic enhancements that potentially increase privacy and enable dynamic participation.

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Bernardo David and Dimitris Karakostas. StakeNote: A Proof-Of-Stake Protocol for CryptoNote Payments. In 8th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 395, pp. 8:1-8:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2026.8

Author Details

Bernardo David
  • IT University of Copenhagen (ITU), Denmark
  • Common Prefix, Copenhagen, Denmark
Dimitris Karakostas
  • Common Prefix, Athens, Greece

Funding

The project was partially funded by Zano and Common Prefix.

Acknowledgements

We thank Andrey Sabelnikov and Sowle for their helpful discussions, questions, and feedback.

Supplementary Materials

References

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