Blockchain Scalability with Proof of Descriptor

Abstract

Blockchain networks use consensus mechanisms so that participants can exchange transactions without the need to rely on a trusted third party. Consensus mechanisms using Proof of Work burn significant energy to select a block miner, and this delay limits performance. Other consensus mechanisms such as Proof of Stake or Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance still designate a single validator to append a block to the chain, preventing blocks from being built and published in parallel. In this article, we introduce a new consensus mechanism, Proof of Descriptor, enabling clients to work together to publish blockchain transactions using a descriptor object which stores information on the cooperative parallel execution of transactions. Proof of Descriptor consensus allows commutative transactions to be mined concurrently. It does not require a single leader to append transactions to the ledger, enabling clients to cooperate on publishing transactions. We also propose a novel graph-based ledger with multiple entry points to facilitate the scalability of Proof of Descriptor, as well as a secure hashing scheme to resist long-range attacks. We demonstrate that our approach is as secure as related works with respect to a malicious leader, 51% attack, and other known blockchain vulnerabilities. Furthermore, our experimental evaluation shows that our approach scales with the size of the network, experiencing up to a 4× improvement in throughput over the fastest sequential blockchain, Solana.