PoVF: Empowering Decentralized Blockchain Systems with Verifiable Function Consensus

TL;DR

This paper introduces PoVF, a novel decentralized consensus mechanism for blockchain that enhances fairness, security, and efficiency by leveraging verifiable functions and a delay buffer to prevent forks and ensure sequential transaction execution.

Contribution

The paper proposes PoVF, a new consensus protocol based on verifiable functions, with a delay buffer to improve decentralization, security, and transaction ordering in blockchain systems.

Findings

PoVF achieves up to 4000 transactions per second.

PoVF-based blockchain has a Gini coefficient of 0.39, indicating high decentralization.

PoVF is provably secure against potential adversaries.

Abstract

Consensus mechanism is the core technology for blockchain to ensure that transactions are executed in sequence. It also determines the decentralization, security, and efficiency of blockchain. Existing mechanisms all have certain centralization issues and fail to ensure the decentralization of blockchain networks. A decentralized and efficient mechanism is required to improve blockchain systems. This paper proposes a fair consensus mechanism called Proof of Verifiable Functions (PoVF), based on the verifiability and unpredictability of verifiable functions. PoVF provides a sufficiently fair mechanism, ensuring that all nodes in blockchain network have equal opportunity to participate in consensus. In addition, a structure called "Delay buffer" is proposed to ensure transactions are executed sequentially. It delay the selection of blocks to avoid blockchain forks caused by broadcasting and transaction execution confusion. According to our security analysis, PoVF is provably secure and has the ability to resist potential adversaries. According to the experiments, PoVF-based blockchain can process up to 4000 transactions per second with nodes configured with only 4-core CPUs. This paper uses the Gini coefficient to measure the decentralization of blockchains, and the PoVF-based blockchain achieves the lowest Gini coefficient of 0.39 among all sampled blockchains. PoVF has been shown to provide sufficient efficiency while ensuring decentralization and security through experiments.