Light Clients for Lazy Blockchains
Ertem Nusret Tas, David Tse, Lei Yang, Dionysis Zindros

TL;DR
This paper introduces an efficient protocol for light clients in lazy blockchains, enabling verification without full transaction history, with logarithmic interaction complexity and a proof system based on a Merkle tree traversal.
Contribution
It presents a novel, succinct proof system and protocol for light clients that operate efficiently in lazy blockchain environments, addressing verification challenges.
Findings
Logarithmic interaction rounds in verification protocol
Proof system is succinct, complete, and sound
Empirical demonstration of scheme feasibility
Abstract
Lazy blockchains decouple consensus from transaction verification and execution to increase throughput. Although they can contain invalid transactions (e.g., double spends) as a result, these can easily be filtered out by full nodes that check if there have been previous conflicting transactions. However, creating light (SPV) clients that do not see the whole transaction history becomes a challenge: A record of a transaction on the chain does not necessarily entail transaction confirmation. In this paper, we devise a protocol that enables the creation of efficient light clients for lazy blockchains. The number of interaction rounds and the communication complexity of our protocol are logarithmic in the blockchain execution time. Our construction is based on a bisection game that traverses the Merkle tree containing the ledger of all - valid or invalid - transactions. We prove that our…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsBlockchain Technology Applications and Security
