Algorand
© 2017 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Algorand is a new cryptocurrency that confirms 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 an...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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ACM
2021
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/137789 |
| _version_ | 1826198873039699968 |
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| author | Gilad, Yossi Hemo, Rotem Micali, Silvio Vlachos, Georgios Zeldovich, Nickolai |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Gilad, Yossi Hemo, Rotem Micali, Silvio Vlachos, Georgios Zeldovich, Nickolai |
| author_sort | Gilad, Yossi |
| collection | MIT |
| description | © 2017 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Algorand is a new cryptocurrency that confirms 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 temporarily 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 125× Bitcoin’s throughput, and incurs almost no penalty for scaling to more users. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T11:11:20Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/137789 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T11:11:20Z |
| publishDate | 2021 |
| publisher | ACM |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1377892023-04-14T19:35:10Z Algorand Scaling Byzantine Agreements for Cryptocurrencies Gilad, Yossi Hemo, Rotem Micali, Silvio Vlachos, Georgios Zeldovich, Nickolai Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory © 2017 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Algorand is a new cryptocurrency that confirms 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 temporarily 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 125× Bitcoin’s throughput, and incurs almost no penalty for scaling to more users. 2021-11-08T19:23:03Z 2021-11-08T19:23:03Z 2017-10-14 2019-06-14T18:03:19Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/137789 Gilad, Yossi, Hemo, Rotem, Micali, Silvio, Vlachos, Georgios and Zeldovich, Nickolai. 2017. "Algorand." en 10.1145/3132747.3132757 Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ application/pdf ACM ACM |
| spellingShingle | Gilad, Yossi Hemo, Rotem Micali, Silvio Vlachos, Georgios Zeldovich, Nickolai Algorand |
| title | Algorand |
| title_full | Algorand |
| title_fullStr | Algorand |
| title_full_unstemmed | Algorand |
| title_short | Algorand |
| title_sort | algorand |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/137789 |
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