CryptoConcurrency: (Almost) Consensusless Asset Transfer with Shared Accounts
Andrei Tonkikh, Pavel Ponomarev, Petr Kuznetsov, Yvonne-Anne Pignolet · 2023
A typical blockchain protocol uses consensus to make sure that mutually mistrusting users agree on the order in which their operations on shared data are executed. However, it is known that asset transfer systems, by far the most popular application of blockchains, can be implemented without consensus. Assuming that no account can be accessed concurrently and every account belongs to a single owner, one can efficiently implement an asset transfer system in a purely asynchronous, consensus-free manner. It has also been shown that implementing asset transfer with shared accounts is impossible without consensus.