Resilient Consensus Sustained Collaboratively

The recent growth of blockchain technology has accelerated research on decentralized platforms. Initial such platforms decide on what should be added to the ledger based on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus protocol. PoW protocol requires its participants to perform massive computations and leads to massive energy wastage. Existing solutions to replace the PoW protocol make use of the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocol or classical fault-tolerant consensus protocols. However, the safety of the ledger created by these protocols is at the mercy of the long-term safe-keeping of the private keys of participants subject to long-range attacks. To ameliorate this situation, we present the design of our novel HybridChain architecture, which requires each client transaction to undergo two consensus protocols: a fault-tolerant consensus followed by our novel Power-of-Collaboration (PoC) protocol. Despite this, we observe that our HybridChain system outperforms state-of-the-art blockchain systems yielding up to 2000x higher throughput and 10^5 times less energy costs.