Baguena: A Practical Proof of Stake Protocol with a Robust Delegation Mechanism

Abstract

Proof of stake (PoS), aiming at replacing Proof of work (PoW) in blockchain consensus, has drawn great attention from academia and industry. We present “Baguena”, a novel PoS protocol for public blockchain with high practicality and security. It uses a special designed algorithm with properties of uniqueness and anonymity for leader selection, and uses the longest chain rule for chain selection. Besides, entropy is introduced to prevent manipulation of leader selection process by simulating a random beacon based on Publicly verifiable secret sharing (PVSS) and threshold signature with only a linear number of exponentiations. We analyze the protocol's security by a threat model and design a robust delegation mechanism based on triple Elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) proxy signature. We implement Baguena and evaluate its performance on 100 Amazon EC2 virtual machines simulating 50k users, which shows that Baguena confirms transactions in 2 minutes, achieves 2.16x of Algorand's throughput and 6.95x of Ouroboros' throughput.