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Documents authored by Neu, Joachim

Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2026.4
Gatling: Rapid-Fire Consensus from Parallel Composition

Authors: Giulia Scaffino, Max Resnick, and Joachim Neu

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 395, 8th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2026)

Abstract
Consensus protocols form the core of blockchains and other replicated state machines, ensuring that all correct nodes process the same totally ordered log of input transactions. In fault-free executions, performance is driven by the good-case transaction latency - the time between a transaction becoming known to all nodes and its confirmation by the consensus protocol - which depends on both how frequently proposals are made and, once made, how quickly they are confirmed. While prior work has established tight lower bounds on confirmation latency that modern protocols already achieve, it remains open whether the inter-proposal time can be further reduced below the state-of-the-art of one network delay. We introduce Gatling, an atomic broadcast protocol that achieves arbitrarily small inter-proposal times under rotating leader schedules; in particular, smaller than the network delay. Gatling runs multiple parallel instances of a black-box atomic broadcast protocol and staggers their proposal schedules to generate proposals in faster succession than state-of-the-art protocols. A deterministic interleaving rule merges the outputs of these instances into a single global log. We analyze the effects of head-of-line blocking caused by crashed leaders, and derive Gatling’s optimal number of parallel instances. We further study the impact of Gatling on predictable validity and present two variants that retain this property. Finally, our experiments confirm that Gatling can be used with off-the-shelf component protocols to achieve low latency without fine-tuning the component protocol for minimum latency.
Cite as

Giulia Scaffino, Max Resnick, and Joachim Neu. Gatling: Rapid-Fire Consensus from Parallel Composition. In 8th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 395, pp. 4:1-4:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)

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@InProceedings{scaffino_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2026.4,
  author =	{Scaffino, Giulia and Resnick, Max and Neu, Joachim},
  title =	{{Gatling: Rapid-Fire Consensus from Parallel Composition}},
  booktitle =	{8th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2026)},
  pages =	{4:1--4:24},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-451-2},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{395},
  editor =	{Kiayias, Aggelos and Kyropoulou, Maria},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2026.4},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-278589},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2026.4},
  annote =	{Keywords: Distributed Systems, Byzantine Fault Tolerance Consensus, Parallel Composition, Inter-Proposal Time}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.17
Fully-Fluctuating Participation in Sleepy Consensus

Authors: Yuval Efron, Joachim Neu, and Toniann Pitassi

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 354, 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)

Abstract
Proof-of-work allows Bitcoin to boast security amidst arbitrary fluctuations in participation of miners throughout time, so long as, at any point in time, a majority of hash power is honest. In recent years, however, the pendulum has shifted in favor of proof-of-stake-based consensus protocols. There, the sleepy model is the most prominent model for handling fluctuating participation of nodes. However, to date, no protocol in the sleepy model rivals Bitcoin in its robustness to drastic fluctuations in participation levels, with state-of-the-art protocols making various restrictive assumptions. In this work, we present a new adversary model, called external adversary. Intuitively, in our model, corrupt nodes do not divulge information about their secret keys. In this model, we show that protocols in the sleepy model can meaningfully claim to remain secure against fully fluctuating participation, without compromising efficiency or corruption resilience. Our adversary model is quite natural, and arguably naturally captures the process via which malicious behavior arises in protocols, as opposed to traditional worst-case modeling. On top of which, the model is also theoretically appealing, circumventing a barrier established in a recent work of Malkhi, Momose, and Ren.
Cite as

Yuval Efron, Joachim Neu, and Toniann Pitassi. Fully-Fluctuating Participation in Sleepy Consensus. In 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 354, pp. 17:1-17:22, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{efron_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2025.17,
  author =	{Efron, Yuval and Neu, Joachim and Pitassi, Toniann},
  title =	{{Fully-Fluctuating Participation in Sleepy Consensus}},
  booktitle =	{7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)},
  pages =	{17:1--17:22},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-400-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{354},
  editor =	{Avarikioti, Zeta and Christin, Nicolas},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.17},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-247362},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.17},
  annote =	{Keywords: Sleepy Consensus, fully-fluctuating dynamic Participation}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.18
From Permissioned to Proof-of-Stake Consensus

Authors: Jovan Komatovic, Andrew Lewis-Pye, Joachim Neu, Tim Roughgarden, and Ertem Nusret Tas

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 354, 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)

Abstract
This paper presents the first generic compiler that transforms any permissioned consensus protocol into a proof-of-stake permissionless consensus protocol. For each of the following properties, if the initial permissioned protocol satisfies that property in the partially synchronous setting, the consequent proof-of-stake protocol also satisfies that property in the partially synchronous and quasi-permissionless setting (with the same fault-tolerance): consistency; liveness; optimistic responsiveness; every composable log-specific property; and message complexity of a given order. Moreover, our transformation ensures that the output protocol satisfies accountability (identifying culprits in the event of a consistency violation), whether or not the original permissioned protocol satisfied it.
Cite as

Jovan Komatovic, Andrew Lewis-Pye, Joachim Neu, Tim Roughgarden, and Ertem Nusret Tas. From Permissioned to Proof-of-Stake Consensus. In 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 354, pp. 18:1-18:26, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{komatovic_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2025.18,
  author =	{Komatovic, Jovan and Lewis-Pye, Andrew and Neu, Joachim and Roughgarden, Tim and Tas, Ertem Nusret},
  title =	{{From Permissioned to Proof-of-Stake Consensus}},
  booktitle =	{7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)},
  pages =	{18:1--18:26},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-400-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{354},
  editor =	{Avarikioti, Zeta and Christin, Nicolas},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.18},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-247373},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.18},
  annote =	{Keywords: Permissioned Consensus, Proof-of-Stake, generic Compiler, Blockchain}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2023.14
Proofs of Proof-Of-Stake with Sublinear Complexity

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

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 282, 5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2023)

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.
Cite as

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)

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@InProceedings{agrawal_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2023.14,
  author =	{Agrawal, Shresth and Neu, Joachim and Tas, Ertem Nusret and Zindros, Dionysis},
  title =	{{Proofs of Proof-Of-Stake with Sublinear Complexity}},
  booktitle =	{5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2023)},
  pages =	{14:1--14:24},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-303-4},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2023},
  volume =	{282},
  editor =	{Bonneau, Joseph and Weinberg, S. Matthew},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2023.14},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-192037},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2023.14},
  annote =	{Keywords: Proof-of-stake, blockchain, light client, superlight, bridge, Ethereum}
}

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