Paper 2022/104

Minotaur: Multi-Resource Blockchain Consensus

Matthias Fitzi, IOG
Xuechao Wang, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Sreeram Kannan, University of Washington at Seattle
Aggelos Kiayias, University of Edinburgh & IOG
Nikos Leonardos, University of Athens
Pramod Viswanath, Princeton University
Gerui Wang, Beijing Academy of Blockchain and Edge Computing
Abstract

Resource-based consensus is the backbone of permissionless distributed ledger systems. The security of such protocols relies fundamentally on the level of resources actively engaged in the system. The variety of different resources (and related proof protocols, some times referred to as PoX in the literature) raises the fundamental question whether it is possible to utilize many of them in tandem and build multi-resource consensus protocols. The challenge in combining different resources is to achieve fungibility between them, in the sense that security would hold as long as the cumulative adversarial power across all resources is bounded. In this work, we put forth Minotaur, a multi-resource blockchain consensus protocol that combines proof of work (PoW) and proof-of-stake (PoS), and we prove it optimally fungible. At the core of our design, Minotaur operates in epochs while continuously sampling the active computational power to provide a fair exchange between the two resources, work and stake. Further, we demonstrate the ability of Minotaur to handle a higher degree of work fluctuation as compared to the Bitcoin blockchain; we also generalize Minotaur to any number of resources. We demonstrate the simplicity of Minotaur via implementing a full stack client in Rust (available open source). We use the client to test the robustness of Minotaur to variable mining power and combined work/stake attacks and demonstrate concrete empirical evidence towards the suitability of Minotaur to serve as the consensus layer of a real-world blockchain.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Published elsewhere. ACM CCS 2022
DOI
10.1145/3548606.3559356
Keywords
Blockchains
Contact author(s)
matthias fitzi @ iohk io
xuechao2 @ illinois edu
ksreeram @ uw edu
aggelos kiayias @ ed ac uk
nikos leonardos @ gmail com
pramodv @ princeton edu
wanggerui @ baec org cn
History
2022-09-07: revised
2022-01-31: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2022/104
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/104,
      author = {Matthias Fitzi and Xuechao Wang and Sreeram Kannan and Aggelos Kiayias and Nikos Leonardos and Pramod Viswanath and Gerui Wang},
      title = {Minotaur: Multi-Resource Blockchain Consensus},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2022/104},
      year = {2022},
      doi = {10.1145/3548606.3559356},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/104}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/104}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.