Internet-Scale Consensus in the Blockchain Era

Par

Joachim Neu

Stanford University

lundi 11 mars 2024, 10:30-11:30 EST, Salle 6214

Pavillon André-Aisenstadt, Université de Montréal, 2920 Chemin de la Tour

Abstract: Blockchains have ignited interest in Internet-scale consensus as a vital building block for decentralized applications and services that promise egalitarian access and robustness to faults and abuse. While the study of consensus has a 40+ year tradition, the new Internet-scale setting requires a fundamental rethinking of models, desiderata, and protocols. An emergent key challenge is to simultaneously serve clients with different requirements regarding the two fundamental aspects of security, liveness ("good things happen") and safety ("bad things don't happen"). For different instances of this theme, I explore the optimal liveness-safety tradeoff, and present the first protocols that achieve it. Results from this line of work have found adoption in the Ethereum blockchain that powers an ecosystem worth $500bn+.

Bio: Joachim Neu is a PhD candidate at Stanford University advised by David Tse. His research focuses on Internet-scale consensus as a key enabler for decentralized systems, and spans distributed systems, probabilistic systems analysis, applied cryptography, and networking/communications. Website: https://www.jneu.net/