Catching the Fly: Practical Challenges in Making Blockchain FlyClient Real
Pericle Perazzo, Dario Capecchi

TL;DR
This paper advances FlyClient, a lightweight blockchain verification protocol, by addressing deployment challenges, providing a formal adversary model, implementing a practical prover for Zcash, and optimizing proof sizes.
Contribution
It introduces a formal adversary model, implements a practical FlyClient prover for Zcash, and proposes proof size optimizations without requiring consensus changes.
Findings
Formal adversary model with economic interpretation
Practical FlyClient prover implementation for Zcash
Two proof size optimization techniques
Abstract
FlyClient is a lightweight blockchain verification protocol that enables proof-of-work validation using minimal data, making it ideal for resource-constrained environments like mobile wallets, Internet-of-Things devices or cross-chain bridges implemented with smart contracts. Despite its strong potential for enabling lightweight blockchain verification, FlyClient protocol is still in the experimental stages, with limited real-world deployments and performance evaluations under diverse conditions. In this paper we bridge the gap between theory and deployment, by addressing several technical challenges to advance FlyClient to a production-ready solution. Namely, our contribution is three-fold: (i) we formally introduce an adversary model alternative to the original FlyClient one, that allows us to parametrize a verifier under a concrete economic interpretation, while also saving some…
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