Stateless Distributed Ledgers

TL;DR

This paper explores stateless distributed ledgers in public DLTs, focusing on how new nodes can efficiently retrieve the current ledger state using minimal data, despite potential conflicts and Byzantine behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces three variants of stateless DLTs—weak, strong, and probabilistic—and analyzes their properties across different consensus mechanisms.

Findings

Defined three variants of stateless DLTs

Analyzed statelessness in various consensus protocols

Provided insights into efficient state retrieval for new nodes

Abstract

In public distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), such as Blockchains, nodes can join and leave the network at any time. A major challenge occurs when a new node joining the network wants to retrieve the current state of the ledger. Indeed, that node may receive conflicting information from honest and Byzantine nodes, making it difficult to identify the current state. In this paper, we are interested in protocols that are stateless, i.e., a new joining node should be able to retrieve the current state of the ledger just using a fixed amount of data that characterizes the ledger (such as the genesis block in Bitcoin). We define three variants of stateless DLTs: weak, strong, and probabilistic. Then, we analyze this property for DLTs using different types of consensus.