{"document_id":"BLC-STUDY-0091","slug":"prism","title":"Deconstructing the Blockchain to Approach Physical Limits","authors":"Vivek Bagaria, Sreeram Kannan, David Tse, Giulia Fanti and Pramod Viswanath","year":2019,"date_label":"2019","publisher":"Vivek Bagaria, Sreeram Kannan, David Tse, Giulia Fanti and Pramod Viswanath","paper_type":"Design paper","category":"Consensus","topics":["Consensus"],"source_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.08092","source_label":"arXiv:1810.08092","legacy_pdf_path":null,"sha256":null,"sha256_note":"No hash is published. This build does not store those PDF bytes, so a checksum would be invented. Where a legacy path exists, it points at the Internet Archive copy of the old library.","version":"Source cited by the 2019 study. The study is the reading. This page does not add a second essay.","doi":null,"rights_status":"Official external source only","source_status":"Official source","use_status":"Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.","licence":null,"licence_label":"No licence recorded. Rights status under review.","full_text":null,"full_text_reason":"Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.","editorial_line":"Bitcoin uses one chain for three jobs: proposing transactions, voting on history, and ordering the result. Prism splits those jobs onto separate block trees so throughput can approach network capacity while confirmation tracks propagation delay.","canonical_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/prism","record_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/prism","study_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/prism","last_reviewed":"2026-10-01","last_checked":"2026-10-01","relationships":[{"rel":"Canonical reading","label":"Prism study","href":"/whitepaper/prism"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Bitcoin-NG","href":"/whitepaper/bitcoin-ng"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"FruitChains","href":"/whitepaper/fruitchains"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"GHOST","href":"/whitepaper/ghost"}]}