Protocol papers
Consensus papers.
A consensus paper answers who may extend the chain and when a result is final. It does not answer whether the later network kept the paper.
How to read this shelf
Each card opens a study. The study is a reading of a public paper, not the paper and not a description of today's network. Status is a design paper unless the record says historical or failure case.
How to read this page
Research status is named on the page. Primary sources are linked. This is a mechanism and operating note, not investment suitability, legal advice, a security guarantee or an implementation certificate.
Cardano · 2017 · Design paper
Ouroboros: A Provably Secure Proof-of-Stake Blockchain Protocol
The academic protocol Cardano's settlement layer is built around. It gives a proof-of-stake chain a stated security argument in a synchronous model, with stake electing slot leaders.
Algorand · 2017 · Design paper
ALGORAND: The Efficient and Democratic Ledger
Micali's ledger design: a proof-of-stake protocol that elects a small, unpredictable committee to certify each block, and replaces participants so a corruptor cannot find them in time.
Avalanche · 2018 · Design paper
Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family
A family of consensus protocols that sample the network repeatedly and tip toward one outcome. The 2018 note was pseudonymous. A later write-up adds named co-authors. Avalanche the network is an implementation, not the sample itself.
Solana · 2018 · Design paper
Solana: A new architecture for a high performance blockchain
Yakovenko's design note for a ledger that encodes the passage of time as a verifiable hash chain, called Proof of History, so that validators spend less effort agreeing on order.
Tendermint · 2014 · Design paper
Tendermint: Consensus without Mining
A practical Byzantine-fault-tolerant state machine for a known validator set, with instant finality on commit. It became the consensus engine under Cosmos SDK chains. The 2014 note is the origin, not the current CometBFT specification.
Tezos · 2014 · Design paper
Tezos — a self-amending crypto-ledger
Goodman's proposal for a ledger whose protocol can be amended by a defined on-ledger process, with stakeholders who bake blocks and who may delegate.
Hedera · 2016 · Design paper
The Swirlds Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm: Fair, Fast, Byzantine Fault Tolerance
Baird's technical report on hashgraph: gossip about gossip, a virtual vote computed from the graph, and a fairness claim about the order of transactions. Hedera is the later public network that uses the algorithm under a governing council.
Nano · 2017 · Design paper
Nano: A Feeless Distributed Cryptocurrency Network
LeMahieu's design, first published as RaiBlocks: each account has its own chain, and the account holder is the only one who can append to it. Value moves by a send block on one chain and a receive block on another.
Zilliqa · 2017 · Design paper
The ZILLIQA Technical Whitepaper
A 2017 design for a sharded chain: a directory service that assigns nodes, shards that process transactions in parallel, and a language proposal aimed at safe-by-construction contracts.
Harmony · 2019 · Design paper
Harmony Technical Whitepaper
A sharded proof-of-stake design that combines a BFT-style consensus inside shards with a randomness scheme for assigning validators, aimed at keeping a single shard from being captured.
MultiversX · 2019 · Design paper
Elrond: A Highly Scalable Public Blockchain via Adaptive State Sharding
The 2019 Elrond paper on adaptive state sharding: shards that hold state, a metachain that notarises results, and a secure proof-of-stake selection of validators. The network later rebranded as MultiversX. The paper remains the design document.
NEAR · 2019 · Design paper
The NEAR White Paper
NEAR's public design paper: a sharded proof-of-stake chain with a single account model, nightshade-style data availability across chunks, and a stated intent that hiding the shards from application authors is part of the product.
Aptos · 2022 · Design paper
The Aptos Blockchain: Safe, Scalable, and Upgradeable Web3 Infrastructure
Aptos Labs' 2022 paper for a Move-based chain that pipelines dissemination, ordering, execution and certification, and that treats protocol upgrades as a first-class feature rather than a hard-fork event.
Sui · 2022 · Design paper
The Sui Smart Contracts Platform
Mysten Labs' platform paper. Assets are Move objects. Operations on objects owned by a single address can finish by consistent broadcast among validators. Shared objects go through consensus. The split is the design.
Diem · 2020 · Historical document
The Diem Blockchain
The technical paper for the Libra, later Diem, payment chain: a permissioned BFT ledger, a Move language for resources, and a reserve-backed currency proposal. The project was wound down in 2022. The paper still matters because Move, and the account model Aptos and Sui started from, was specified here.
Mina · 2020 · Design paper
Coda: Decentralized Cryptocurrency at Scale
The Coda paper, later the Mina protocol: a chain whose certificate is a constant-size succinct proof, so a client can check the state without replaying history. The project renamed from Coda to Mina. The paper keeps the original name.
TON · 2021 · Design paper
The Open Network
Durov's design for a multi-chain system of account-chains gathered into shardchains, with a masterchain that records the others. It began as Telegram's network design and continued as The Open Network after Telegram stepped away from the original launch.
Kadena · 2018 · Design paper
Chainweb: A Proof-of-Work Parallel-Chain Architecture for Massive Throughput
Kadena's public parallel-chain design. Many proof-of-work chains advance together, and each block commits to peer-chain headers, so a confirmation is a braid rather than a single chain. This is not the 2016 private-chain note already in the historic library.
EOSIO · 2018 · Design paper
EOS.IO Technical White Paper
The 2018 technical paper for EOSIO: delegated proof of stake, named block producers, and an operating-system metaphor for accounts, permissions and resource allocation. It is a design document. It is not a description of later governance fights around any one chain that used the software.
Internet Computer · 2018 · Design paper
DFINITY Consensus System
The DFINITY consensus overview: a randomness beacon, a ranking of block proposers, and notarisation so that a chain can come to agreement quickly among a large set. The Internet Computer is the later network built by the DFINITY foundation on this line of research.