Martin Peresini | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

SNARKChain: Proof-of-Useful-Work Blockchain Consensus with General-Purpose SNARK Marketplace

Proof of Work (PoW) is widely regarded as the most secure permissionless blockchain consensus protocol. However, its reliance on computationally intensive yet externally useless puzzles results in excessive electric energy wasting. To alleviate this, Proof of Useful Work (PoUW) has been explored as an alternative to secure blockchain platforms while also producing real-world value. Despite this promise, existing PoUW proposals often fail to embed the integrity of the chain and the identity of the miner into the puzzle solutions, not meeting the necessary requirements for PoW and thus rendering them vulnerable. In this work, we propose a PoUW consensus protocol that computes client-outsourced SNARK proofs as a byproduct, which are simultaneously used to secure the consensus protocol. We further leverage this mechanism to design a decentralized marketplace for outsourcing SNARK proof generation, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the first such marketplace operating at the consensus layer while meeting all necessary properties of PoW.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

AQUAREUM: Non-Equivocating Censorship-Evident Centralized Ledger with EVM-Based Verifiable Execution using Trusted Computing and Blockchain

Distributed ledger systems (i.e., blockchains) have received a lot of attention. They promise to enable mutually untrusted participants to execute transactions while providing the immutability of the data and censorship resistance. Although decentralized ledgers are a disruptive innovation, as of today, they suffer from scalability, privacy, or governance issues. Therefore, they are inapplicable for many important use cases, where interestingly, centralized ledger systems might gain adoption. Unfortunately, centralized ledgers have also drawbacks, e.g., a lack of efficient verifiability or a higher risk of censorship and equivocation. In this paper, we present AQUAREUM, a novel framework for centralized ledgers removing their main limitations. By a unique combination of a trusted execution environment (TEE) with a public blockchain, AQUAREUM provides publicly verifiable non-equivocating censorship-evident private and high-performance ledgers. AQUAREUM is integrated with a Turing-complete virtual machine (e.g., EVM), allowing arbitrary transaction processing logic, such as transfers or client-specified smart contracts. AQUAREUM is fully implemented and can process over 400 transactions per second on a commodity PC. Furthermore, we modeled AQUAREUM using the Universal Composability framework and proved its security.

cs.CR↗