Blockchain systems provide a decentralized and fault-tolerant infrastructure for maintaining a shared transaction ledger without relying on a trusted central authority. Nakamoto consensus, in particular, enables open participation and robust agreement in permissionless environments. However, these benefits typically rely on broad data replication, which requires participants to download and propagate large volumes of transaction data and can therefore impose substantial communication overhead. This thesis proposes and analyzes a bandwidth-efficient data recoverability protocol for Nakamoto consensus using erasure-coded sampling. Instead of requiring every participant to download a full transaction batch, the protocol allows an operator to encode a large transaction batch, called a mega transaction, into coded chunks and publish a compact cryptographic commitment on chain. Participants verify sampled coded chunks and cast PoW-bound votes on their validity. The Nakamoto consensus layer then determines whether the mega transaction should be accepted as recoverable, so that it can be reconstructed and verified later if a dispute arises. The main focus of this thesis is to formalize the recoverability failure event: the event that the protocol incorrectly accepts a mega transaction as recoverable even though honest participants do not collectively hold enough valid coded chunks for reconstruction. We derive conservative analytical bounds on the probability of this event and use these bounds to formulate a utility-based parameter-selection problem under a target security requirement. Monte Carlo estimates validate the analytical bounds, and numerical results illustrate the tradeoff between recovery communication overhead and confirmation latency.
PQ-Sortition is a post-quantum cryptographic sortition protocol constructed from the NTRU lattice hardness assumption and instantiated using Falcon-512 (FN-DSA). The construction uses deterministic Falcon signing to obtain a reproducible, publicly verifiable proof and combines it with a consensus-layer commit-then-reveal mechanism to address the lack of unconditional uniqueness inherent in GPV-style lattice signatures. The work introduces NTRU-Sortition, a many-time lattice-based verifiable random function construction, and provides formal analyses of third-party uniqueness, pseudorandomness under the NTRU-SIS assumption in the Random Oracle Model, and provability. The paper further defines PQ-Sortition as a post-quantum proof-of-stake leader-election protocol using a historical randomness beacon, stake-weighted sortition, adaptive difficulty, equivocation slashing, and grinding resistance. The Falcon-512 instantiation provides a 32-byte output and proofs of up to 666 bytes. The paper also presents concrete performance measurements, security parameters, consensus integration details, comparisons with prior post-quantum VRF constructions, and open research problems.
The emergence of blockchain technologies is changing how we manage data through decentralized, secure systems. In the realm of consensus mechanisms, such as PoW, PoS, and PBFT, several limitations make these technologies inadequate for handling the challenges of IoT-enabled environments and Mutual Distributed Ledgers (MDLs), which require constant and reliable access to their data. These consensus models are reactive, resulting in increased response times (latencies) when a failure or disruption occurs, decreased throughput, and extended recovery periods. The lack of adaptive intelligence to recognize and recover from failures in real-time exacerbates these network failures. This research introduces the Predictive Consensus Algorithm to Blockchain Networks with Failure Detection and Recovery in Real-Time (PCB-FDAR). PCB-FDAR provides a new mechanism by integrating machine learning-based predictive analytics with real-time network monitoring to anticipate future failures and automatically reconfigure the network without human intervention. The framework also enables fault-tolerance across interconnected blockchain environments. PCB-FDAR has been shown through experimentation to outperform traditional consensus mechanisms. When comparing chipsets with an average of 40 blocks, the PCB-FDAR framework achieves an average latency of 1,600 ms, which represents a 42.86% reduction from PoW (2,800 ms) and a 36.00% reduction over PBFT (2,500 ms). In addition, when performing scalability testing, PCBFDAR delivers as high as 1,800 transactions per second (TPS), representing a 450 × improvement over PoW (4 TPS) and a 32.7 × improvement over PoS (55 TPS). Lastly, the PCBFDAR automatic recovery mechanism reduces failure recovery time from 180 to 30 s, resulting in an 83.33% decrease and providing 99% operational availability. Thus, the results of this study demonstrate that PCB-FDAR provides a scalable, reliable, and fault-tolerant consensus framework for real-time distributed applications.
Beacon Kit: Ecosystem epoch heartbeat @ the world game (s). Block-time arbitrage tokenized commodity index, adaptive procedural template @ system of federated DeFi cryptocurrency quantum - AI systems consensus
The article discusses a decentralized electronic voting system based on blockchain technology. This study aims to improve the performance and fault tolerance of blockchain-based electronic voting systems by introducing the Automated Leaderless Byzantine Fault Tolerance (AL-BFT) consensus protocol. This study aims to develop and evaluate an electronic voting system model that applies the proposed AL-BFT consensus mechanism in a permissioned peer-to-peer network. The methods used include computer modeling of a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, implementation of a decentralized ledger, and experimental load testing of the consensus protocol. System performance is evaluated using key metrics, such as transaction latency, throughput (requests per second), fault tolerance threshold, and scalability. The study results include the development of a conceptual architecture for the electronic voting system, the identification of its core components, and the analysis of their interactions to ensure data integrity and the reliability of voting results. At each stage of the electoral process, data security is considered, and additional protection mechanisms are analyzed to enhance system robustness. Eliminating the leader election phase from the consensus process is a key feature of the proposed approach, thereby reducing coordination overhead and enabling more efficient agreement among nodes. The proposed AL-BFT protocol reduces transaction latency and improves throughput while maintaining the fault tolerance level of traditional Byzantine Fault Tolerance-based approaches. The results confirm improved efficiency compared to classical leader-based consensus mechanisms, particularly in small permissioned blockchain networks. Conclusions. A practical implementation of the system has been developed and tested under real simulated load conditions. The proposed solution ensures stable system operation and reliable consensus formation. The system can be effectively applied to university elections, organizational voting, and other scenarios that require transparency, security, and manipulation resistance
Secure distributed systems offer reliability and privacy guarantees that are crucial across applications ranging from blockchains and cloud computing to fault-tolerant distributed Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). These protocols enable groups of mutually distrusting parties to collaborate and execute tasks at scale while maintaining robust security guarantees against faulty and adversarial behavior. Blockchains demonstrate that the reliability half of this promise is achievable in practice, with deployments spanning hundreds of parties over geo-distributed testbeds. The privacy half has {\it not} kept pace: despite rapidly growing demand from applications such as anonymous networks and privacy-preserving AI, systems at blockchain scale have been unable to offer privacy guarantees. At the other end of the spectrum, the reliability techniques that succeeded in the blockchain setting are far too expensive for emerging distributed CPS applications, where hardware and network conditions are substantially weaker. In both settings, existing solutions are too slow and resource-intensive to be deployed in practice. This thesis asks whether both guarantees can be delivered at the scale their applications demand, on the hardware those applications actually run on.The first half of this thesis builds Multi-Party Computation (MPC) protocols for systems with a hundred or more parties over real-world geo-distributed networks, motivated by modern blockchains. MPC enables $n$ mutually distrusting parties to jointly compute any function over their private inputs. We identify computationally expensive heavyweight cryptography based on number-theoretic hardness assumptions as the central scalability bottleneck and address it by designing protocols entirely using \emph{lightweight} cryptography such as symmetric-key encryption and cryptographic Hash functions. These tools are two orders of magnitude cheaper than heavyweight operations and additionally offer post-quantum security. We present three works in this line: HashRand, a random beacon protocol, Velox, an MPC protocol achieving fairness, and Aeternum, a framework for guaranteed output delivery in asynchronous MPC and dynamic proactive secret sharing. We implement and evaluate all three, showing that they outperform prior work by two orders of magnitude and scale to $100$ or more parties on geo-distributed testbeds with practical latency and communication costs.The second half turns to Asynchronous Approximate Agreement (AAA) for distributed CPS with a hundred or more parties, motivated by robot and drone swarms. Unlike randomized Byzantine Agreement (BA) protocols, which depend on expensive heavyweight cryptography to produce common coins, AAA protocols are deterministic and avoid these tools. These protocols still have a high cubic communication cost, which is unaffordable in the low-bandwidth CPS setting. We introduce \emph{Relaxed Validity}, an approximate validity property that allows nodes to trade the accuracy of the protocol's output for sub-cubic communication.Leveraging this property, we design SensorBFT and Delphi, both AAA protocols with sub-cubic communication overhead. We apply both to agreement problems in the CPS domain and experimentally demonstrate their scalability relative to prior works. Both consume an order of magnitude less energy than prior protocols based on randomized BA, a decisive metric on resource- and power-constrained sensor devices.
Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus is a foundational achievement indistributed systems theory, providing dual guarantees of safety and liveness forasynchronous networks with malicious nodes. However, this theoretical frameworkimplicitly relies on a presupposition that has not been sufficiently examined: allhonest nodes are homogeneous in their cognition of the protocol’sobjectives. Whena decentralized system evolves from a closed task-oriented network into an opengovernance ecosystem, the functional differentiation of nodes in storage strategies,verification preferences, and governance commitments deprives this presuppositionof descriptive validity. This paper does not deny the security contributions of BFT,but argues that security alone is insufficient to constitute a complete consensus.The full logic of consensus requires a complementary dimension: the capacity toaccommodate functional differentiation. Integrating recent empirical classificationstudies of blockchain nodes, protocol architecture design experiences that acknowledge functional differentiation, and Ostrom’s polycentric governance theory, thispaper proposes“Cognitive Niche Equilibrium”(CNE) as an extension of the consensus concept. System stability does not require all nodes to be isomorphic inevery function; rather, it requires the simultaneous satisfaction of three stabilityconditions: feedback anchoring, cross-validation, and evolutionary stability. Using Bitcoin and Ethereum as comparative cases, this paper translates these threeconditions into a layered implementation architecture symbiotic with existing BFTprotocol stacks, and discusses the security engineering principles and trade-offsunder this framework.
Hassan Cessi Ibrahim, Damilare Timothy Ogunjobi, Philip Mensah
The networks that run operational technology (OT) substations, water treatment plants, oil and gas pipelines, and manufacturing lines are moving from a centralized control to a federated, multi-stakeholder architecture coordinated by permissioned distributed ledgers. Protection and control loops in the electrical grid and other critical infrastructure have protection-relay tripping times, IEC 61850 GOOSE message classes, and SCADA/PMU polling cycles that impose multi-millisecond to sub-second deadlines on protection and control operations, while Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols like PBFT, Tendermint, HotStuff, and HoneyBadgerBFT were designed for settlement workloads that can tolerate hundreds of milliseconds to seconds of latency. In this paper, we survey four representative BFT families, discuss their structural latency and scalability constraints for OT deployment, and introduce a hybrid consensus algorithm called IsoBFT (Isochronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance), which combines an optimistic single-round-trip fast path with a PBFT-style fallback mechanism based on a network-stability monitor, and elects a small rotating committee using a verifiable random function (VRF). A formal system model, safety/liveness/termination proof, and security analysis for eight attack classes are provided, with a proposition quantifying the degradation of the practical availability of the safety guarantee when the global Byzantine fraction is approaching one-third. Using realistic Modbus/DNP3/IEC 61850 OT traffic, the discrete-event simulation of the design IsoBFT managed to execute realistic workloads with median consensus latency ranging from 4.90ms at n = 10-50 to 9.17-11.26ms at n = 100 and n = 500, remaining competitive with or better than PBFT and Tendermint across this range. Committee-bounded communication overhead stayed essentially flat with respect to the number of validators from n = 10 to n = 50, but newly completed runs at n = 100 and n = 500 (n = 200 still outstanding) show overhead growing faster than the quadratic scaling of PBFT and Tendermint over that range, together with a heavy P95/P99 latency tail not present at smaller scale; this discrepancy with the theoretical scale-independence result is reported and discussed rather than resolved. IsoBFT could reduce the median latency by approximately 81% and 56% under up to 33% Byzantine faults compared to HotStuff and HoneyBadgerBFT, respectively, at n = 10-50, while maintaining the safety of the system; a Byzantine-resilience sweep at n = 100 shows a narrower advantage over PBFT/Tendermint than at smaller scale.
The inherent challenge of balancing scalability, security, and decentralization – commonly termed the blockchain trilemma – continues to hinder the adoption of distributed systems. This paper presents InternxtChain, a decentralized storage framework designed to address this trilemma through a novel integration of erasure-coded sharding, zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (zk-SNARKs), and a sharded Proof-of-Storage consensus mechanism. By leveraging aggregated BLS-381 signatures and distributed redundancy protocols, the framework achieves a throughput of 2,800 transactions per second with a latency of 420 milliseconds across 1,024 nodes, surpassing Filecoin by a factor of 3.5 and Ethereum’s capacity by 165 times. The system maintains 99.9% data integrity even under adversarial conditions involving 30% Byzantine nodes. Additionally, InternxtChain reduces storage costs to $0.002 per gigabyte, representing an 85% reduction compared to centralized alternatives like AWS S3. Empirical evaluations demonstrate linear scalability to 4,200 transactions per second with 2,048 nodes, alongside hardware affordability at $180 per node. These advancements not only outperform decentralized platforms in throughput by 2.8 times but also ensure GDPR-compliant data sovereignty, positioning InternxtChain as a pioneering solution for Web3 ecosystems seeking to harmonize enterprise-grade performance with decentralized trustlessness.
This project introduces "X-142's Blockchain," a novel multi-layer architecture designed to resolve key bottlenecks in existing distributed ledger technologies. Traditional Order-Execute (OE) and Execute-Order-Verify (EOV) transaction models introduce severe sequential processing delays under peak loads, while standard Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus mechanisms remain vulnerable to malicious validator collusion. To address these limitations, our methodology implements a dual-layer network infrastructure consisting of a Main Layer and a Subordinate Layer governed by a "Guardian" node tracking reputation metrics to neutralize routing attacks. Furthermore, the framework integrates cryptographic trust via Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP), utilizing an optimized Nova IVC-PloNK framework to guarantee fixed-size proof validation regardless of off-chain network states.Experimental benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed architecture achieves linear throughput degradation with increasing validator counts while maintaining strong Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus properties. The multi-layer anchoring system successfully enforces data sovereignty and real-time network visibility without penalizing nominal network throughput. Future development will focus on optimizing the SN-PoA PPO selectors using real operational traces, replacing current consensus components with quantum-resistant cross-layer proofs, and validating the framework across heterogeneous, multi-organizational Wide Area Network (WAN) deployments.
We present a comparative implementation of the same financial settlement circuit in five zero-knowledge proofsystems—Groth16, Halo2/IPA, STARK/FRI, PLONK/KZG, and Nova/folding—and report the design consequencesthat appear only when the comparison is performed on a complete stateful application rather than onmicrobenchmarks.The application is a minimal settlement layer with double-entry value conservation, spending authority, doublespendprevention, threshold issuance, burns, selective disclosure for supervision, and account freezing. Unlikebenchmark suites centered on primitives such as SHA-256, this setting forces persistent state updates, globalinvariants, and multi-authority rules into every backend.We document nine implementation findings absent from typical comparative tables. The most consequential forarithmetization is that AIR lacks native copy constraints, which creates a silent soundness gap when updatingMerkle state unless a lockstep dual-climb pattern is enforced. The most consequential for the application is thatsingle-step settlement discloses the recipient’s balance to the payer, which forced a two-phase transferdesign. We also report identical-condition measurements for setup, proving, verification, and proof size; explainwhy Groth16 was rejected despite superior proof size; and record methodology errors that were detected andcorrected during the work.The reference implementation is public and test-backed. It is not third-party audited and does not implementdistributed consensus. We treat both limitations as part of the result.
A controlled timestamp-only projection of an ABD-style multiwriter quorum-register tag leaves completed reads current, exact, and linearizable while omitting the writer-identity component of the full protocol tag. Correctness therefore does not imply auditability at a distributed read boundary. A deterministic five-state host gives the protocol-independent companion: four sequential operations are totally ordered in real time, yet the read boundary exposes no source evidence. For an external specification fixed before the realization is chosen, zero-error boundary recovery exists exactly when all co-encoding locations agree and native source evidence aligns with the specified source and derivation relation. Under edit-generated source semantics, boundary agreement is equivalent to temporal zero-delay synchronization. Disjoint audited systems compose, but two independently verified services can assign incompatible roles to one shared location. Value projection likewise fails to preserve auditability; a certified refinement law transports it. A CAP partition carrier induces the corresponding read-boundary discriminator, but carrier data alone cannot supply the scheduler continuations required for an FLP transport. Finite DLS histories yield an exact stabilization-certificate bound and exclude one fixed evidence budget across all horizons. Protocol and replicated-storage rows illustrate the criterion across distributed boundaries. The substrate-independent ledger records the broader scope. Lean 4 verifies the finite models, reductions, abstraction maps, and internal bounds; the premises linking named systems to those models remain documentary.
Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) remain the dominant consensus mechanisms for public blockchains, yet both suffer from well-documented limitations: PoW incurs prohibitive energy costs and scales poorly with network size, while PoS tends to concentrate validator influence among large stake holders, reintroducing a form of economic centralization.This paper proposes Proof of Effort (PoE), a novel consensus mechanism in which validator eligibility is determined exclusively by verifiable, continuous protocol participation rather than by computational expenditure or financial stake.PoE integrates four lightweight security primitives -node-identity binding via asymmetric key pairs, sequence-number-based replay prevention, digital-signature message authentication, and threshold-based malicious-node detection -chosen specifically to impose negligible per-node overhead while maintaining Byzantine resilience.We formalize the effort accumulation model mathematically, provide a detailed pseudocode specification of the protocol, and evaluate the mechanism through an agent-based simulation implemented in NetLogo 6.4 with 500 heterogeneous agents (350 honest, 150 adversarial).Simulation results, presented with full graphical and tabular support, demonstrate that PoE achieves an average throughput of 900 tx/s (vs. 25 tx/s for PoS and 7 tx/s for PoW), reduces average consensus latency to 56 ms (vs.400 ms and 1,200 ms), and correctly identifies 92-97% of malicious agents while accepting fewer than 0.2% of forged or replayed messages.The effort gap between honest and adversarial nodes remained below 0.21%, confirming protocol fairness under adversarial load, and the validator-selection Gini coefficient of 0.18 represents a 71% improvement in participation equality over PoS.These results position PoE as a compelling candidate for permissioned and consortium blockchain deployments where energy efficiency, participation fairness, and lightweight security are primary requirements.
Blockchain technology provides a decentralized and secure data-management system. However, PoW consensus remains vulnerable to the risk of 51% attacks, where a single miner or pool controls over half of the network and can manipulate blocks and execute double-spending. This paper proposes a defense mechanism called Consensus-Level Restriction (CLR) for Ethereum Classic. It limits the number of sequential blocks from a single miner to reduce the feasibility of 51% attacks. We evaluated the effectiveness of CLR by using BlockSim simulator. Results show that CLR reduces the success rate of 51% attacks while maintaining a decentralized structure. This work strengthens blockchain security without compromising PoW principles.
In the Bitcoin system, transactions arrive continuously at miners' mempools and await inclusion in future blocks. Every non-coinbase transaction must spend one or more unspent outputs created by previous transactions, inducing dependency constraints among transactions in the mempool. At the same time, miners are economically incentivized to prioritize transactions with higher fee rates, measured as transaction fee per unit size. This paper formulates the mempool linearization problem: given a set of transactions with associated fees, sizes, and dependency relationships, compute a dependency-respecting transaction ordering that maximizes fee-rate efficiency while supporting efficient updates as the mempool evolves dynamically. The problem is characterized through a partition of transactions into disjoint dependency-respecting subsets ordered by decreasing aggregate fee rate, together with an equivalent LP formulation. Motivated by structural properties of basic feasible solutions in the simplex method, a new algorithm called spanning forest linearization (SFL) is developed. Operating directly on the transaction dependency graph, SFL iteratively merges and splits chunks of transactions to refine a global ordering, and is guaranteed to terminate at an optimal solution. Evaluation on both synthetic and real-world Bitcoin mempool data shows that SFL consistently computes optimal linearizations with substantially lower runtime than competing approaches, including a method based on the parametric preflow algorithm of Gallo, Grigoriadis, and Tarjan. These results indicate that SFL provides a practical and scalable framework for transaction prioritization by decentralized miners in large and rapidly evolving mempools. SFL has also been incorporated into the Bitcoin Core codebase for transaction cluster linearization.
Harlequin is a blockchain protocol in which the right to take part in consensus, governance and adjudication comes solely from reputation earned by verifiable acts — never from capital (proof of stake) or expended computation (proof of work). Reputation is a four-dimensional quantity ("the four suits"), computed deterministically from a public evidence record by a damped trust-propagation function, aggregated conservatively (a strong dimension cannot buy authority in a weak one), and subject to time decay so that standing must be continually re-earned. Block authorship and committee/jury membership are assigned by reputation-weighted cryptographic sortition; finality is provided by a Byzantine-safe gadget over signed votes; disputes are judged by sortitioned juries with interest-exclusion, and the only enforced consequence is reputational — the protocol applies no coercive force. We give the system model, the consensus and justice mechanisms, and a security analysis against a state-level adversary whose goal is capture, censorship or de-anonymization rather than direct theft. Two results are emphasized for their honesty. First, steady-state Sybil resistance is strong: a Sybil farm without earned evidence obtains about 0% of consensus power (17/17 adversarial tests). Second, the cold-start window is not unconditionally safe: a competent adversary present at genesis can capture the bootstrap; we show the security of that window is a race between honest onboarding and adversary mass — bounded, not eliminated, by non-operator personhood verification, an automatic ceiling-halt and the onboarding rate, with the residual risk declared. We report an implementation in Rust (dependency-free cores cross-validated against FRAME pallets) and a reproducible validation record spanning unit tests and multi-node hardware runs. v3 — post-launch revision. The network described here is no longer a design: the chain launched on 18 July 2026, with its genesis seed anchored to Bitcoin block 958536, and has been sealing blocks under the mechanisms this paper describes since. This revision corrects the emission schedule (per-era public ratios: 15/16 for HLQ, 3/4 for SOV, decoupled from the reputational decay constant), documents the launch facts and the first on-chain runtime upgrade executed through the paper's governance mechanism, and updates the evaluation with the live chain's validation record. Both English and Spanish editions are included; the English edition is the primary text.
Christian Cachin, David Lehnherr, Juan Villacis, François-Xavier Wicht
Sender untraceability hides the account spent by a cryptocurrency transfer among a set of candidates, its masking set. What a transfer does to that set separates two designs: classical schemes retain the whole set and append a nullifier marking the spent account, so the ledger grows with every transfer; constant-state schemes instead consume and replace the entire set. We ask how this choice affects synchronization. We formalize the two designs as the linear and constant untraceable asset transfer objects (LUAT and CUAT) and locate them in the consensus hierarchy. In LUAT, transfers from distinct accounts commute. Its consensus number is 2, compared with 1 for standard asset transfer, independently of the masking-set size and of the untraceability notion, and LUAT is starvation-free. Partitioning the accounts into fixed masking sets lets exhausted sets be garbage-collected without increasing that number. In CUAT, a transfer consumes and replaces every account of its masking set, so two transfers whose sets intersect cannot both take effect. We formalize this with the conflict graph on masking sets, whose edges join sets sharing an account. Under weak untraceability, which protects a transaction in isolation, the consensus number is unbounded already for one-round protocols. Under strong untraceability, which protects against an observer of the complete history, untraceability holds on a history exactly when any two accounts sharing a masking set occur in the same number of the masking sets in it. This uniform incidence bounds the conflict graph, and matching constructions attain it, so the consensus number is determined exactly and grows quadratically in the masking-set size. Finally, CUAT is not starvation-free. The two objects therefore pay for the same privacy differently: LUAT in storage, CUAT in synchronization and fairness.
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) have turned out to be an underlying enabler of trust, security, and automation in the next-generation wireless networks (6G). Contrasting centralized control models, the DLTs offer decentralized coordination, record keeping which is immutable, and programmable logic, which is consistent with the ultra-dense and intelligent heterogeneous ecosystems of 6G. The paper has discussed the performance implications of incorporation of the SDLTs with 6G networks in blockchain, directed acyclic graph based ledger and hybrid DLT architectures. There was an integrated DLT-6G framework where cross-layer communication between radio access, core, edge computing, and distributed ledgers was highlighted. To model the latency of transactions, their throughput, energy usage, and consensus overhead were modeled based on the 6G communication characteristics including ultra-low latency, massive connectivity, and edge intelligence. A large-scale set of simulations was done to test the DLT-based network slicing, secure resource orchestration, and AI-assisted ledger management and compared the results to that of traditional non-DLT methods. The results have shown that lightweight and DAG-based DLTs were much more cost-effective in terms of confirmation delay and energy usage, whereas in dense 6G operation, hybrid designs were more scalable and dependable. Moreover, ledger management with the help of AI improved flexibility in changing the conditions of traffic and mobility.
Abstract Distributed ledgers – decentralized databases maintained by network consensus – are often modeled as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to capture the causal structure of data addition. Although blockchain systems like Bitcoin use linear chains, alternatives such as tangle in IOTA employ random DAGs. In such mechanisms each new transaction approves multiple predecessors selected through a randomized process. Prior work has established a fluid-limit approximation of the tangle’s growth, governed by a delay differential equation. In this paper we go beyond the fluid limit by analyzing the next-order behavior. We show that the fluctuations around the deterministic limit converge to a Gaussian process and derive a stochastic delay differential equation (SDDE) that describes this next-order approximation.
The set reconciliation problem, that consists in bringing two or more replicas of a set into agreement is present in all databases, distributed ledgers and any large scale synchronization systems.While the two party case is well studied, the multiparty one exposes a large design space of protocols whose communication cost varies drastically with topology, replica count and the level of similarity.A very slow space to search on by hand.This thesis investigates the use of an autonomous agent loop as a research tool to navigate that specific design space.This means using an agent to iteratively propose, implement and evaluate reconciliation protocols against a single measurable objective until convergence is achieved.In this case, the objective was the total bytes transmitted, including state and metadata, taken as a geometric mean over an evaluation matrix with eighteen cells and three seeds.The search yielded MultiReplica, a topology dispatched protocol that combines all neighbor Bloom filter exchange on star and tree topologies with pairwise distance doubling on chord and that reduces communication cost by roughly 30 % relative to the strongest hand designed baseline while scaling to replica counts at which the baselines exhaust memory.The contribution is twofold.On one side the discovered protocol itself and a reproducible demonstration that an autonomous agent loop can serve as a credible, auditable method for distributed systems protocol research.
The emergence and expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) have created an increasing need for distributed, secure, and scalable consensus protocols that can validate transactions in such volatile and resource-limited environments. DAG-based ledger systems, in combination with Fast Probabilistic Consensus (FPC) offer high throughput with minimal communication cost for conflict resolution. However, traditional FPC does not have any logical means of assigning weight to different validators in an adversarial setting. In this context, this article attempts to present a hybrid Proof-of-Stake and Fast Probabilistic Consensus (PoS-FPC) protocol for DAG-based IoT systems. The proposed framework consists of transaction attachments on a DAG graph, Ed25519 signatures, BLAKE2b-256 hashing, a weighted quorum for non-conflicting transactions, and a stake-weighted FPC algorithm for the resolution of conflicting transactions. The weight of validators in the proposed framework is computed based on an adaptive weighting scheme that uses the normalized weight of stake and mana, dynamically tunes their weights depending on network traffic, and implements reward and penalty mechanisms to ensure honest participation and prevent malicious attacks. The proposed framework was tested by conducting discrete event simulations of 20,000 transactions in different adversarial situations. The experimental evaluation yielded a throughput of 5,128 transactions per second, a decision accuracy of 99.6%, adversary resistance of 97.81%, a quorum latency of 69.782 ms, FPC conflict latency of 690 ms and average convergence time of 3.73 rounds of the FPC algorithm. When compared to a mana-based DAG-FPC framework that was evaluated under the same simulation setup, the proposed framework outperforms it in terms of decision accuracy, conflict latency, faster convergence, and robustness to adversarial participation of up to 40%.
This paper presents a unified back‑end settlement architecture designed to support multi‑rail, ledger‑agnostic financial transactions across modern digital asset systems. It defines a deterministic settlement model capable of coordinating fiat rails, tokenized assets, distributed ledgers, and messaging networks under a single canonical framework. The architecture introduces a universal settlement core that abstracts rail‑specific behaviors into standardized primitives, enabling consistent execution, reconciliation, and finality across heterogeneous systems. It incorporates a canonical identity layer, semantic tokenization model, and compliance‑aware routing logic to ensure interoperability between traditional financial infrastructure and emerging tokenized environments. Key contributions include: A multi‑rail settlement engine supporting synchronous and asynchronous flows Deterministic finality logic for cross‑rail and cross‑ledger operations A universal bridge framework for rail‑agnostic asset movement Canonical identity mapping for participants, assets, and transaction states Semantic tokenization rules enabling unified representation of digital and traditional instruments Compliance and audit primitives embedded directly into the settlement workflow This work provides a complete architectural foundation for institutions seeking to modernize settlement operations, integrate tokenized assets, and achieve interoperability across fragmented financial rails. It serves as a reference model for next‑generation clearing and settlement systems.
Zhongjing Wei, Osaid Muhammad Ameer, Nikita Borisov, Yupeng Zhang
Modernizing the security of operational technology systems that control critical infrastructure has become a pressing challenge. Because edge devices have limited capabilities, modernization has relied on application gateways that interface with identity management systems and enforce access policies. These gateways are powerful enough to perform complex authorization decisions and support zero-trust architectures, but they create major deployment and management burdens: they must be collocated with remote, distributed edge devices, kept up to date with security patches, and managed with minimal downtime. We propose Provable Remote Execution of Zero-Trust Authorization (Prezta), an architecture that eliminates these gateways by evaluating policies within a zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) running on the client. The zkVM produces a succinct proof of authorization that edge devices can verify efficiently, extending the zero-trust security envelope to the edge. Policies and identity management schemes can evolve without updating edge devices. To demonstrate the feasibility of Prezta, we implement a prototype built using the RISC Zero zkVM that supports XACML 3.0 policies and JWT identity claims. While zkVMs introduce substantial proof overhead, we mitigate this overhead by compiling policies to Rust code and precompiling regular expressions. Combined with optimized signature verification and JWT parsing, these measures reduce prover time by more than an order of magnitude. Our compiler correctly implements 83\% of the XACML 3.0 conformance suite, with proof generation completing in tens of seconds on a desktop. Verification, by contrast, takes only tens of milliseconds, which is fast enough for resource-constrained edge devices.
Abstract Stateless Ethereum is one of the most promising directions for improving blockchain scalability, but witness size remains a major deployment challenge. Existing witness generation techniques often treat all transaction workloads uniformly, resulting in unnecessary communication overhead and reduced verification efficiency. This paper presents AWCV (Adaptive Witness Compression for Stateless Ethereum Using Verkle Trees), an adaptive compression framework that reduces witness size while preserving efficient verification. AWCV combines locality-aware transaction clustering, subtree deduplication, adaptive witness construction, and delta encoding to eliminate redundant proof data without modifying Ethereum's verification semantics. The proposed framework is evaluated across representative blockchain workloads and demonstrates significant reductions in witness size, bandwidth requirements, and verification latency compared with conventional witness generation approaches. AWCV remains fully compatible with Ethereum's Verkle Tree roadmap while improving the practicality of stateless client synchronization and scalable decentralized applications. The results suggest that adaptive witness compression provides an effective and practical path toward efficient Stateless Ethereum deployments without sacrificing security or correctness.