Paper 2021/742
Conclave: A Collective Stake Pool Protocol
Dimitris Karakostas and Aggelos Kiayias and Mario Larangeira
Abstract
Proof-of-Stake (PoS) distributed ledgers are the most common alternative to Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work (PoW) paradigm, replacing the hardware dependency with stake, i.e., assets that a party controls. Similar to PoW’s mining pools, PoS’s stake pools, i.e., collaborative entities comprising of multiple stakeholders, allow a party to earn rewards more regularly, compared to participating on an individual basis. However, stake pools tend to increase centralization, since they are typically managed by a single party that acts on behalf of the pool’s members. In this work we propose Conclave, a formal design of a Collective Stake Pool, i.e., a decentralized pool with no single point of authority. We formalize Conclave as an ideal functionality and implement it as a distributed protocol, based on standard cryptographic primitives. Among Conclave’s building blocks is a weighted threshold signature scheme (WTSS); to that end, we define a WTSS ideal functionality — which might be of independent interest — and propose two constructions based on threshold ECDSA, which enable (1) fast trustless setup and (2) identifiable aborts.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
- Category
- Cryptographic protocols
- Publication info
- Preprint. MINOR revision.
- Keywords
- BlockchainProof-of-StakeStake PoolsUniversal Composability
- Contact author(s)
- dimitris karakostas @ ed ac uk,akiayias @ inf ed ac uk,mario @ c titech ac jp
- History
- 2021-06-03: received
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2021/742
- License
-
CC BY