Paper 2017/454
Algorand: Scaling Byzantine Agreements for Cryptocurrencies
Yossi Gilad, Rotem Hemo, Silvio Micali, Georgios Vlachos, and Nickolai Zeldovich
Abstract
Algorand is a new cryptocurrency system that can confirm transactions
with latency on the order of a minute while scaling to many users.
Algorand ensures that users never have divergent views of confirmed
transactions, even if some of the users are malicious and the network is
partitioned. In contrast, existing cryptocurrencies allow for temporary
forks and therefore require a long time, on the order of an hour, to confirm transactions with
high confidence.
Algorand uses a new Byzantine Agreement (BA) protocol to reach consensus
among users on the next set of transactions. To scale the consensus to
many users, Algorand uses a novel mechanism based on Verifiable Random
Functions that allows users to privately check whether they are selected
to participate in the BA to agree on the next set of transactions,
and to include a proof of their selection in their network messages.
In Algorand's BA protocol, users do not keep any private state except
for their private keys, which allows Algorand to replace participants
immediately after they send a message. This mitigates targeted attacks
on chosen participants after their identity is revealed.
We implement Algorand and evaluate its performance on 1,000 EC2 virtual
machines, simulating up to 500,000 users. Experimental results show that
Algorand confirms transactions in under a minute, achieves 30
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Publication info
- Preprint. MINOR revision.
- Contact author(s)
- yossigi @ csail mit edu
- History
- 2017-09-24: last of 2 revisions
- 2017-05-25: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2017/454
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2017/454, author = {Yossi Gilad and Rotem Hemo and Silvio Micali and Georgios Vlachos and Nickolai Zeldovich}, title = {Algorand: Scaling Byzantine Agreements for Cryptocurrencies}, howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2017/454}, year = {2017}, url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/454} }