ZipperChain: Transmuting Trusted Third-Party Services Into Trustless Atomic Broadcast

TL;DR

ZipperChain transforms trusted third-party services into a trustless system for atomic broadcast, achieving high throughput and quick finality without traditional distributed consensus.

Contribution

It introduces a novel construction that replaces distributed consensus with trusted third-party services, enabling faster and more scalable transaction processing.

Findings

Transaction throughput approaches network line speeds.

Block finality is approximately 500 ms.

No native token required for verification.

Abstract

Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) rely on distributed consensus mechanisms to reach agreement over the order of transactions and to provide immutability and availability of transaction data. Distributed consensus suffers from performance limitations of network communication between participating nodes. BLOCKY ZipperChain guarantees immutability, agreement, and availability of transaction data, but without relying on distributed consensus. Instead, its construction process transfers trust from widely-used, third-party services onto ZipperChains's correctness guarantees. ZipperChain blocks are built by a pipeline of specialized services deployed on a small number of nodes connected by a fast data center network. As a result, ZipperChain transaction throughput approaches network line speeds and block finality is on the order of 500 ms. Finally, ZipperChain infrastructure creates blocks centrally and so does not need a native token to incentivize a community of verifiers.