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Permissionless and asynchronous asset transfer

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Abstract

Most modern asset transfer systems use consensus to maintain a totally ordered chain of transactions. It was recently shown that consensus is not always necessary for implementing asset transfer. More efficient, asynchronous solutions can be built using reliable broadcast instead of consensus. This approach has been originally used in the closed (permissioned) setting. In this paper, we extend it to the open (permissionless) environment. We present Pastro, a permissionless and asynchronous asset-transfer implementation, in which quorum systems, traditionally used in reliable broadcast, are replaced with a weighted Proof-of-Stake mechanism. Pastro tolerates a dynamic adversary that is able to adaptively corrupt participants.

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Notes

  1. The recent algorithms designed for dynamic systems with churn [1, 20] assume no lower bounds on communication and computation times, which, formally, allows for squeezing an infinite execution in a finite time interval. Therefore the basic assumption made in [1, 20] that the churn observed within a fixed period of time is bounded effectively boils down to assuming that the number of configuration changes in an execution is finite.

  2. We discuss how to split the processes into replicas and clients in Sect. 7.

  3. In practice, this assumption boils down to requiring that the rate at which processes are added is not too high. Otherwise, if new stake-holders are introduced into the system at a speed prohibiting a client from reaching a sufficiently large fraction of them, we cannot make sure that the clients’ transactions are eventually accepted.

  4. We encode this map as a set of tuples (q, d), where \(q\in \Pi \) and \(d>0\) is the amount received sent to q in tx.

  5. In Sect. 7, we discuss how to maintain a dynamic system stake.

  6. Recall that two lattices can be easily composed: given two lattices \(({\mathcal {C}}_1, \sqsubseteq _1)\) and \(({\mathcal {C}}_2, \sqsubseteq _2)\), we can define a lattice \(({\mathcal {C}}, \sqsubseteq ) = ({\mathcal {C}}_1 \times {\mathcal {C}}_2, \sqsubseteq _1 \times \sqsubseteq _2)\). Given two elements of the composed lattice \(x = (c_1, d_1)\) and \(y = (c_2, d_2)\), \(x \sqsubseteq y\) iff \(c_1 \sqsubseteq _1 c_2\) and \(d_1 \sqsubseteq _2 d_2\).

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive feedback. Petr Kuznetsov and Andrei Tonkikh were supported by TrustShare Innovation Chair (sponsored by Mazars).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LTCI, Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, France

    Petr Kuznetsov & Andrei Tonkikh

  2. DFINITY, Zurich, Switzerland

    Yvonne-Anne Pignolet

  3. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

    Pavel Ponomarev

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  1. Petr Kuznetsov
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  2. Yvonne-Anne Pignolet
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  3. Pavel Ponomarev
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  4. Andrei Tonkikh
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Correspondence to Petr Kuznetsov, Yvonne-Anne Pignolet, Pavel Ponomarev or Andrei Tonkikh.

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Kuznetsov, P., Pignolet, YA., Ponomarev, P. et al. Permissionless and asynchronous asset transfer. Distrib. Comput. 36, 349–371 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-023-00449-x

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