BeYond BLOckchainS: Modular Building Blocks for Large-Scale Trustless Multi-users Apps – ByBloS

The rise of blockchains over the last decade has attracted growing attention from both academia and industry, leading to the development of several highly-visible systems and algorithms. These blockchain-based systems come, however, with many caveats in terms of performance and scal- ability, that are inherent to the total order that blockchain algorithms seek to achieve on their operations, which implies in turn a Byzantine-tolerant agreement. To overcome these limitations, we propose in this project to take a step aside, and exploit the fact that many applications – in- cluding cryptocurrencies – do not require full Byzantine agreement, and can be implemented with much lighter, and hence more scalable and more efficient, guarantees. We further argue that these novel Byzantine-tolerant applications have the potential to power large-scale multi-user online sys- tems, and that in addition to Byzantine Fault Tolerance, these systems should also provide strong privacy protection mechanisms, that are designed from the ground up to exploit implicit synergies with Byzantine mechanisms.