FastSet: Parallel Claim Settlement

TL;DR

FastSet is a distributed protocol for decentralized finance and data settlement that leverages actor parallelism, sacrificing strong consistency to improve scalability while maintaining core blockchain benefits.

Contribution

It introduces a novel parallel settlement protocol that forgoes strong consistency, enabling scalable and correct decentralized transactions without inter-validator communication.

Findings

Protocol is proven correct despite parallelism.

Achieves blockchain-like benefits with improved scalability.

Operates without validator communication.

Abstract

FastSet is a distributed protocol for decentralized finance and settlement, which is inspired from both actors and blockchains. Account holders cooperate by making claims, which can include payments, holding and transferring assets, accessing and updating shared data, medical records, digital identity, and mathematical theorems, among others. The claims are signed by their owners and are broadcast to a decentralized network of validators, which validate and settle them. Validators replicate the global state of the accounts and need not communicate with each other. In sharp contrast to blockchains, strong consistency is purposely given up as a requirement. Yet, many if not most of the blockchain benefits are preserved, while capitalizing on actor's massive parallelism. The protocol is proved to be correct, despite its massively parallel nature.