Managing Write Access without Token Fees in Leaderless DAG-based Ledgers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel access control scheme for leaderless DAG-based distributed ledgers that uses credits instead of token fees, aiming to improve scalability and decentralization.

Contribution

It proposes a new credit-based access control model for DAG ledgers, addressing write management without token fees and demonstrating promising simulation results.

Findings

Simulation shows performance improvements

Credit-based access control enables parallel writes

Reduces reliance on token fee mechanisms

Abstract

A significant portion of research on distributed ledgers has focused on circumventing the limitations of leader-based blockchains mainly in terms of scalability, decentralization and power consumption. Leaderless architectures based on directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) avoid many of these limitations altogether, but their increased flexibility and performance comes at the cost of increased design complexity, so their potential has remained largely unexplored. Management of write access to these ledgers presents a major challenge because ledger updates may be made in parallel, hence transactions cannot simply be serialised and prioritised according to token fees paid to validators. In this work, we propose an access control scheme for leaderless DAG-based ledgers which is based on consuming credits rather than paying fees in the base token. We outline a general model for this new approach and provide some simulation results showing promising performance boosts.