Proxima. A DAG based cooperative distributed ledger

TL;DR

Proxima introduces a DAG-based distributed ledger that enables permissionless, high-throughput, and scalable transactions through cooperative consensus among token holders, eliminating miners and reducing energy consumption.

Contribution

It presents a novel DAG-based architecture with a cooperative consensus mechanism that ensures decentralization and scalability without miners or energy-intensive processes.

Findings

Achieves high throughput and low transaction costs.

Maintains decentralization and open participation.

Operates without miners or energy-intensive consensus.

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel architecture for a distributed ledger, commonly referred to as a "blockchain", which is organized in the form of directed acyclic graph (DAG) with UTXO transactions as vertices, rather than as a chain of blocks. Consensus on the state of ledger assets is achieved through the cooperative consensus: an profit-driven behavior of token holders themselves, which is viable only when they cooperate by following the "biggest ledger coverage rule", akin the "longest chain rule" of Bitcoin. The cooperative behavior is facilitated by enforcing purposefully designed UTXO transaction validity constraints. Token holders are the sole category of participants authorized to make amendments to the ledger, making participation completely permissionless - without miners, validators, committees or staking - and without any need of knowledge about the composition of the set of all participants in the consensus. The setup allows to achieve high throughput and scalability alongside with low transaction costs, while preserving key aspects of high decentralization, open participation, and asynchronicity found in Bitcoin and other proof-of-work blockchains, but without huge energy consumption. Sybil protection is achieved similarly to proof-of-stake blockchains, using tokens native to the ledger, yet the architecture operates in a leaderless manner without block proposers and committee selection.