This is an old revision of the document!
Cryptocurrencies@EPFL
Decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum enable distrusting parties (e.g., anonymous users on the Internet) to coordinate their financial operations.
For instance, users can exchange assets, pay for some service, coordinate on a lottery, raise funds cooperatively, or use escrows.
Understanding cryptocurrencies
Our aim is to understand the foundational blocks underlying cryptocurrency systems. To do so, we study these systems from a distributed computing perspective. Concretely, we seek to get a thorough understanding of cryptocurrencies by deconstructing them into well-known primitives, e.g., consensus algorithms, atomic snapshots, read/write registers, failure detectors, etc.
Why Bitcoin is an Overkill
One of the main results we have obtained is an asynchronous (i.e., consensusless) approach to implementing decentralized asset transfers. We use this approach to design AT2 (Asynchronous Trustworthy Transfers), a class of algorithms for solving asset transfers in various models, namely in the shared memory model, as well as in the deterministic & probabilistic message-passing models.
With help from the ZettaBytes channel (YouTube), we have created a series of explanatory videos where we describe the main idea behind AT2:
AT2: Consensusless Decentralized Cryptocurrency // ZettaBytes, EPFL
Publications & Preprints
- Rachid Guerraoui, Petr Kuznetsov, Matteo Monti, Matej Pavlovic, and Dragos-Adrian Seredinschi. “AT2: Asynchronous Trustworthy Transfers”, (arXiv:1812.10844) ☞
- Rachid Guerraoui, Petr Kuznetsov, Matteo Monti, Matej Pavlovic, and Dragos-Adrian Seredinschi. “The Consensus Number of a Cryptocurrency”. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2019)