Consensusless Blockchain: A Promising High-Performance Blockchain without Consensus

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel blockchain design that eliminates the consensus phase, enabling faster transaction processing and simpler infrastructure, while addressing key security challenges.

Contribution

It introduces a consensusless blockchain model with a monotonic scoring and witness mechanism, reducing complexity and increasing throughput.

Findings

Significantly increased transactions per second (TPS).

Reduced infrastructure complexity and cost.

Potential for more scalable decentralized applications.

Abstract

Consensus is unnecessary when the truth is available. In this paper, we present a new perspective of rebuilding the blockchain without consensus. When the consensus phase is eliminated from a blockchain, transactions could be canonized quickly using a well-defined universal rule without consuming hashing power. Thus, the transactions per second(TPS) metric of such the consensusless blockchain can be largely boosted. Although consensus blockchain is promising, several technical challenges are also crucial. For example, double-spending attacks and frequent forking events must be prevented, the credit of block's minting must be carefully defined, and etc. To address those technical challenges, we propose several solutions for our consensusless blockchain (CB), including a naive monotonic scoring mechanism to calculate the ranking of each block in the chain, and a two-stage witness mechanism to add new blocks. The proposed CB chain is promising to offer a simplified and equipment-cheap infrastructure for rich real-world decentralized applications.