Cob: a consensus layer enabling sustainable sharding-based consensus protocols

TL;DR

This paper presents Cob, a leaderless Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus protocol, as a scalable and sustainable foundation for sharding-based blockchain systems, utilizing a novel auxiliary blockchain called Synchronization Chain.

Contribution

It introduces Cob as a leaderless consensus protocol suitable for sharding blockchains and proposes the Synchronization Chain to enhance scalability and sustainability.

Findings

Cob enables parallel consensus on event components.

The proposed architecture improves scalability and reduces computation.

Synchronization Chain facilitates efficient consensus implementation.

Abstract

In this paper we explore a context of application of Cob, a recently introduced Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus protocol. Cob proves to be a leaderless consensus protocol which carries out the consensus process in parallel on each component of a list of events to be observed and recorded. We show how Cob can be used to define a consensus layer for scalable and sustainable blockchains. This layer is used to design consensus protocols based on sharding as a mean to achieve scalability, and on the fragmentation of time in time-slots (which get assigned to nodes that are instructed to create new blocks) as a mean to reduce the amount of computation and communication necessary for the maintenance of the distributed ledger. We explain why Cob is a viable candidate to implement such consensus layer through the introduction of an auxiliary blockchain that we name Synchronization Chain.