From Permissioned to Proof-of-Stake Consensus

Abstract

This paper presents the first generic compiler that transforms any permissioned consensus protocol into a proof-of-stake permissionless consensus protocol. For each of the following properties, if the initial permissioned protocol satisfies that property in the partially synchronous setting, the consequent proof-of-stake protocol also satisfies that property in the partially synchronous and quasi-permissionless setting (with the same fault-tolerance): consistency; liveness; optimistic responsiveness; every composable log-specific property; and message complexity of a given order. Moreover, our transformation ensures that the output protocol satisfies accountability (identifying culprits in the event of a consistency violation), whether or not the original permissioned protocol satisfied it.