Cascade: Asynchronous Proof-of-Stake

28^th April 2022, 16:00
Roger Wattenhofer
ETH Zurich

Abstract

Nakamoto’s Bitcoin protocol has taught the world how to achieve trust without a designated trusted party. However, Bitcoin’s proof-of-work solution comes at serious costs and compromises. While solving the energy problem of proof-of-work, proof-of-stake introduces some of its own problems. We relax the usual notion of consensus to extract the requirements necessary for an efficient cryptocurrency. Towards this end, we introduce a blockchain design called Cascade that is consensusless, asynchronous, scalable, deterministic, and efficient. While Cascade has its own limitations, it should serve as a nice discussion basis for a better blockchain design.

Cascade is joint work with Jakub Sliwinski.