# Fission: A Provably Fast, Scalable, and Secure Permissionless Blockchain

## TL;DR

Fission introduces a scalable, secure, and decentralized permissionless blockchain using innovative pipelining, adaptive partitioning, and a hybrid network to improve throughput, reduce confirmation time, and maintain core blockchain values.

## Contribution

The paper presents Fission, a blockchain system that combines novel pipelining, adaptive partitioning, and a hybrid network to enhance scalability and security while preserving decentralization.

## Key findings

- Achieves high throughput via block pipelining.
- Reduces transaction confirmation time with a relay network.
- Ensures security with a provably secure consensus protocol.

## Abstract

We present Fission, a new permissionless blockchain that achieves scalability in both terms of system throughput and transaction confirmation time, while at the same time, retaining blockchain's core values of equality and decentralization. Fission overcomes the system throughput bottleneck by employing a novel Eager-Lazy pipeling model that achieves very high system throughputs via block pipelining, an adaptive partitioning mechanism that auto-scales to transaction volumes, and a provably secure energy-efficient consensus protocol to ensure security and robustness. Fission applies a hybrid network which consists of a relay network, and a peer-to-peer network. The goal of the relay network is to minimize the transaction confirmation time by minimizing the information propagation latency. To optimize the performance on the relay network in the presence of churn, dynamic network topologies, and network heterogeneity, we propose an ultra-fast game-theoretic relay selection algorithm that achieves near-optimal performance in a fully distributed manner. Fission's peer-to-peer network complements the relay network and provides a very high data availability via enabling users to contribute their storage and bandwidth for information dissemination (with incentive). We propose a distributed online data retrieval strategy that optimally offloads the relay network without degrading the system performance. By re-innovating all the core elements of the blockchain technology - computation, networking, and storage - in a holistic manner, Fission aims to achieve the best balance among scalability, security and decentralization.