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arXiv · 2205.06384

Cob: a consensus layer enabling sustainable sharding-based consensus protocols

Andrea Flamini·Riccardo Longo·Alessio Meneghetti
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Abstract

In this paper we explore a context of application of Cob, a recently introduced Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus protocol. Cob proves to be a leaderless consensus protocol which carries out the consensus process in parallel on each component of a list of events to be observed and recorded. We show how Cob can be used to define a consensus layer for scalable and sustainable blockchains. This layer is used to design consensus protocols based on sharding as a mean to achieve scalability, and on the fragmentation of time in time-slots (which get assigned to nodes that are instructed to create new blocks) as a mean to reduce the amount of computation and communication necessary for the maintenance of the distributed ledger. We explain why Cob is a viable candidate to implement such consensus layer through the introduction of an auxiliary blockchain that we name Synchronization Chain.

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Andrea Flamini, Riccardo Longo, Alessio Meneghetti. 2022-05-12. Cob: a consensus layer enabling sustainable sharding-based consensus protocols. https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.06384

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