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July 07, 2020, 06:13:41 PM |
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Achieving finality in blockchain protocols is a challenging issue that has recently become the focus of major research efforts across the world.
Most existing blockchains either rely on a Nakamoto-style of consensus, where the chain can fork and produce rollbacks, or on a committee-based Byzantine fault tolerant (CBFT) consensus, where no rollbacks are possible. While the latter ones offer better consistency, the former can be more efficient, tolerate more corruptions, and offer better availability during bad network conditions.
When researching more about the issue I finally found some interesting research that has been ongoing for sometime, but hasn't been in the limelight. I am watching this very closely and found some startling revelations and see where this is all leading up to.
It is certainly a major challenge to engineer a high assurance implementation of a finality layer such as Afgjort and execute it over a blockchain protocol with a large enough user base (and a proper stake distribution) guaranteeing that less than one-third of the committee is malicious.
Finality layer can be combined with a Nakamoto-style blockchain and periodically declare blocks as final, preventing rollbacks beyond final blocks.
It sure has been one of the most interesting research topics in blockchain, that I believe is a unique breakthrough in the blockchain world which very few blockchains have achieved.
What was even more interesting was all this research finally lead me to Concordium, and I've become a huge fan of this project since after diving deep about what they have been silently researching for a very longtime away from all the limelight.
In the coming days I will be researching in detail and sharing my insights.
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