Paper 2018/269

Vault: Fast Bootstrapping for Cryptocurrencies

Derek Leung and Adam Suhl and Yossi Gilad and Nickolai Zeldovich

Abstract

Decentralized cryptocurrencies rely on participants to keep track of the state of the system in order to verify new transactions. As the number of users and transactions grows, this requirement places a significant burden on the users, as they need to download, verify, and store a large amount of data in order to participate. Vault is a new cryptocurrency designed to minimize these storage and bootstrapping costs for participants. Vault builds on Algorand’s proof-of-stake consensus protocol and uses several techniques to achieve its goals. First, Vault decouples the storage of recent transactions from the storage of account balances, which enables Vault to delete old account state. Second, Vault allows sharding state across participants in a way that preserves strong security guarantees. Finally, Vault introduces the notion of stamping certificates that allow a new client to catch up securely and efficiently in a proof-of-stake system without having to verify every single block. Experiments with a prototype implementation of Vault’s data structures shows that Vault reduces the bandwidth cost of joining the network as a full client by 99.7% compared to Bitcoin and 90.5% compared to Ethereum when downloading a ledger containing 500 million transactions.