Conclave: A Collective Stake Pool Protocol

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract / Description of output

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 and propose two constructions based on threshold ECDSA, which enable (1) fast trustless setup and (2) identifiable aborts.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationComputer Security - ESORICS 2021: 26th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, Darmstadt, Germany, October 4–8, 2021, Proceedings, Part I
EditorsElisa Bertino, Haya Shulman, Michael Waidner
Place of PublicationCham
PublisherSpringer
Pages370-389
Number of pages20
ISBN (Print)978-3-030-88418-5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 30 Sept 2021
Event26th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, 2021 - Online
Duration: 4 Oct 20218 Oct 2021
Conference number: 26
https://esorics2021.athene-center.de/index.php

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science
PublisherSpringer Cham
Volume12972
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Symposium

Symposium26th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, 2021
Abbreviated titleESORICS 2021
Period4/10/218/10/21
Internet address

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