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Conclave: A Collective Stake Pool Protocol

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Computer Security – ESORICS 2021 (ESORICS 2021)

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Abstract

Proof-of-Stake (PoS) distributed ledgers are the most common alternative to Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work (PoW) paradigm, replacing the hardware dependency with stake, i.e., assets that a party controls. Similar to PoW’s mining pools, PoS’s stake pools, i.e., collaborative entities comprising of multiple stakeholders, allow a party to earn rewards more regularly, compared to participating on an individual basis. However, stake pools tend to increase centralization, since they are typically managed by a single party that acts on behalf of the pool’s members. In this work we propose Conclave, a formal design of a Collective Stake Pool, i.e., a decentralized pool with no single point of authority. We formalize Conclave as an ideal functionality and implement it as a distributed protocol, based on standard cryptographic primitives. Among Conclave’s building blocks is a weighted threshold signature scheme (WTSS); to that end, we define a WTSS ideal functionality and propose two constructions based on threshold ECDSA, which enable (1) fast trustless setup and (2) identifiable aborts.

This work is supported by JSPS KAKENHI No. JP21K11882.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The carbon footprint of: i) a single Bitcoin transaction is equivalent to 1, 202, 422 VISA transactions; ii) the total Bitcoin network is comparable to Sweden. (https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption; May 2021).

  2. 2.

    86% of Bitcoin’s hashing power and 83% of Ethereum’s hashing power are controlled by 5 entities each. (https://miningpools.com; May 2021).

  3. 3.

    https://cardano.org.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Dimitris Karakostas & Aggelos Kiayias

  2. Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

    Mario Larangeira

  3. IOHK, Hong Kong, China

    Dimitris Karakostas, Aggelos Kiayias & Mario Larangeira

Authors
  1. Dimitris Karakostas
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  2. Aggelos Kiayias
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  3. Mario Larangeira
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dimitris Karakostas .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Elisa Bertino

  2. National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE, Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT, Darmstadt, Germany

    Haya Shulman

  3. National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE , Technische Universität Darmstadt, Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT, Darmstadt, Germany

    Michael Waidner

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Karakostas, D., Kiayias, A., Larangeira, M. (2021). Conclave: A Collective Stake Pool Protocol. In: Bertino, E., Shulman, H., Waidner, M. (eds) Computer Security – ESORICS 2021. ESORICS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12972. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88418-5_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88418-5_18

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