SklCoin: Toward a Scalable Proof-of-Stake and Collective Signature Based Consensus Protocol for Strong Consistency in Blockchain

Jaroucheh, Zakwan; Ghaleb, Baraq; Buchanan, William J

Abstract

The proof-of-work consensus protocol suffers from two main limitations: waste of energy and offering only probabilistic guarantees about the status of the blockchain. This paper introduces SklCoin, a new Byzantine consensus protocol and its corresponding software architecture. This protocol leverages two ideas: 1) the proof-of-stake concept to dynamically form stake-proportionate consensus groups that represent block miners (stakeholders), and 2) scalable collective signing to efficiently commit transactions irreversibly. SklCoin has immediate finality characteristic where all miners instantly agree on the validity of blocks. In addition, SklCoin supports high transaction rate because of its fast miner election mechanism.

Citation

Jaroucheh, Z., Ghaleb, B., & Buchanan, W. J. (2020). SklCoin: Toward a Scalable Proof-of-Stake and Collective Signature Based Consensus Protocol for Strong Consistency in Blockchain. . https://doi.org/10.1109/icsa-c50368.2020.00034

• Conference Name: 2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture Companion (ICSA-C)
• Conference Location: Salvador, Brazil
• Start Date: Mar 16, 2020
• End Date: Mar 20, 2020
• Acceptance Date: Feb 2, 2020
• Online Publication Date: May 19, 2020
• Publication Date: May 19, 2020
• Deposit Date: May 24, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: May 25, 2020
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• ISBN: 9781728174150
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/icsa-c50368.2020.00034
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2664401