ComChain: A Blockchain with Byzantine Fault Tolerant Reconfiguration
Concurrency and Computation, Practice and Experience, 2020. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Blockchain.
Guillaume Vizier, Ecole Polytechnique
Vincent Gramoli, University of Sydney
As an alternative to the energy greedy proof-of-work, new blockchains constrain the set of participants whose selection is debatable. These blockchains typically allow a fixed consortium of machines to decide upon new transaction blocks. In this paper, we introduce the community blockchain that bridges the gap between these public blockchains and constrained blockchains. The idea is to allow potentially all participants to decide upon “some” block while restricting the set of participants deciding upon “one” block. We also propose an implementation called ComChain that builds upon the Red Belly Blockchain, the fastest blockchain we are aware of. It runs a consensus among the existing community to elect a new community. This reconfiguration speeds up as the number of removed nodes increases.
This paper was co-authored by our CTO and Founder Professor Vincent Gramoli.
Professor Vincent Gramoli is a full professor at the University of Sydney. He is a researcher in the field of distributed systems and algorithms, with a focus on the design and analysis of distributed systems and algorithms for shared memory and data-centric systems, including distributed hash tables, distributed shared memory and transactional memory. He has published numerous papers in top-tier conferences and journals in the field and has received several awards for his research. He is also currently serving as the Head of Concurrent Systems Research Group at the University of Sydney.