Securing Parallel-chain Protocols under Variable Mining Power
Xuechao Wang, Viswa Virinchi Muppirala, Lei Yang, Sreeram Kannan, Pramod Viswanath · 2021
Several emerging proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain protocols rely on a ''parallel-chain'' architecture for scaling, where instead of a single chain, multiple chains are run in parallel and aggregated. A key requirement of practical PoW blockchains is to adapt to mining power variations over time (Bitcoin's total mining power has increased by a 1014 factor over the decade). In this paper, we consider the design of provably secure parallel-chain protocols which can adapt to such mining power variations.