GPoS: Geospatially-aware Proof of Stake

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the lack of geospatial decentralization in major PoS blockchains and introduces GPoS, a new consensus mechanism that improves geographic diversity with minimal performance impact.

Contribution

We propose GPoS, a geospatially-aware PoS protocol that enhances decentralization across regions while maintaining consensus efficiency.

Findings

GPoS achieves an average 45% improvement in geospatial decentralization.

GPoS incurs minimal overhead in BFT consensus protocols.

Major PoS blockchains currently have concentrated geographic voting power.

Abstract

Geospatial decentralization is essential for blockchains, ensuring regulatory resilience, robustness, and fairness. We empirically analyze five major Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchains: Aptos, Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana, and Sui, revealing that a few geographic regions dominate consensus voting power, resulting in limited geospatial decentralization. To address this, we propose Geospatially aware Proof of Stake (GPoS), which integrates geospatial diversity with stake-based voting power. Experimental evaluation demonstrates an average 45% improvement in geospatial decentralization, as measured by the Gini coefficient of Eigenvector centrality, while incurring minimal performance overhead in BFT protocols, including HotStuff and CometBFT. These results demonstrate that GPoS can improve geospatial decentralization {while, in our experiments, incurring minimal overhead} to consensus performance.