QuickSync: A Quickly Synchronizing PoS-Based Blockchain Protocol
Shoeb Siddiqui, Varul Srivastava, Raj Maheshwari, Sujit Gujar · 2023
Proof-of-Stake(PoS) based blockchain protocols have gained popularity due to their higher throughput and low carbon footprint when compared with Proof-of-Work blockchain protocols. The two major parts of blockchain protocols are the selection of the next block proposer and the selection of the longest chain. In PoS the block publishers are selected based on their relative stake. However, PoS-based blockchain protocols may face vulnerability against Fully Adaptive Corruptions. This paper proposes a novel PoS-based blockchain protocol, QuickSync, to achieve security against Fully Adaptive Corruptions while improving performance. Towards this, we propose a metric for each block: block power. We compute the chain power of a chain as the sum of block powers of all the blocks comprising the chain. The chain selection rule selects the chain with the highest chain power as the valid chain. Since the block proposer is not selected upfront, this scheme is resilient to fully adaptive corruptions, which we also show formally. We also ensure that our block power mechanism is resistant to Sybil attacks. We prove the security of QuickSync by showing that it satisfies the common prefix, chain growth, and chain quality properties. Our analysis demonstrates that QuickSync performs better than Bitcoin by order of magnitude on both transactions per second and time to finality.