Search Results

Documents authored by Wicht, François-Xavier


Document
The Consensus Number of Untraceable Cryptocurrencies

Authors: Christian Cachin, David Lehnherr, Juan Villacis, and François-Xavier Wicht

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


Abstract
Privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies hide which account funds a transfer among a set of candidate accounts, called its masking set. To prevent the hidden account from being spent twice, classical schemes retain the candidates and append a nullifier that marks the spent account without revealing it. Their ledgers therefore grow with every transfer. Constant-state schemes instead consume and replace the entire masking set. Here, we study the synchronization cost of this second design. We introduce the constant untraceable asset transfer (CUAT) object. A CUAT transfer atomically replaces every account in its masking set; hence two transfers with intersecting sets cannot both succeed. We capture this contention by a conflict graph on transfer invocations, whose edges join invocations with intersecting masking sets. In one-round protocols, the relevant sets form a clique at a critical configuration. In general protocols, only sets from opposite valency classes must intersect. Under weak untraceability, which considers one transaction in isolation, CUAT has unbounded consensus number even for one-round protocols. Under strong untraceability, which considers the complete history, accounts in a common masking set must have equal incidence. This condition makes both the one-round consensus power and CUAT’s consensus number grow quadratically with the masking-set size. Cyclic and projective-plane constructions establish the corresponding one-round lower bounds, while a recursive grid construction shows that CUAT’s consensus number is exactly the square of the masking-set size. CUAT is also not starvation-free. The full version studies the complementary linear untraceable asset transfer (LUAT) object, which retains its masking set and records a nullifier. Its state grows, but its consensus number is two for every masking-set size and under either untraceability notion, and it is starvation-free. Thus LUAT pays for untraceability in storage, whereas CUAT pays in synchronization and fairness.

Cite as

Christian Cachin, David Lehnherr, Juan Villacis, and François-Xavier Wicht. The Consensus Number of Untraceable Cryptocurrencies. In 8th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 395, pp. 5:1-5:24, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)


Copy BibTex To Clipboard

@InProceedings{cachin_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2026.5,
  author =	{Cachin, Christian and Lehnherr, David and Villacis, Juan and Wicht, Fran\c{c}ois-Xavier},
  title =	{{The Consensus Number of Untraceable Cryptocurrencies}},
  booktitle =	{8th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2026)},
  pages =	{5:1--5:24},
  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.2026.5},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-278593},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2026.5},
  annote =	{Keywords: Consensus number, untraceability, privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies, wait-freedom, masking sets, concurrent objects}
}

Any Issues?
X

Feedback on the Current Page

CAPTCHA

Thanks for your feedback!

Feedback submitted to Dagstuhl Publishing

Could not send message

Please try again later or send an E-mail