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.
PBFT · 1999 · Design paper
Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance
The paper that made a Byzantine quorum practical: a known set of replicas, three phases, and a view change when the leader is useless. Tendermint and HotStuff inherit the shape. Open membership is a different problem.
Bitcoin-NG · 2016 · Design paper
Bitcoin-NG: A Scalable Blockchain Protocol
Separate the rare proof-of-work election from the frequent publication of transactions. Key blocks choose a leader. That leader's microblocks carry the transactions until the next key block.
GHOST · 2015 · Design paper
Secure High-Rate Transaction Processing in Bitcoin
At high block rates the longest chain throws away too much honest work. GHOST follows the heaviest subtree, so blocks off the main tip still count for the fork choice.
PHANTOM · 2018 · Design paper
PHANTOM and GHOSTDAG
A blockDAG protocol that still ends in one linear order. Honest blocks cluster. The parameter k is how wide that cluster may be. Kaspa is a later network in this line, not the paper.
SPECTRE · 2016 · Design paper
SPECTRE: A Fast and Scalable Cryptocurrency Protocol
Blocks form a DAG and vote pairwise on which of two blocks came first. In the common case that vote settles quickly. The paper does not promise a total order of every pair, which is why it is a poor fit for general contracts.
Casper FFG · 2017 · Design paper
Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget
A finality overlay. Validators cast two rounds of votes so that a chain of checkpoints becomes justified and then final. Equivocation can be slashed. The gadget does not, by itself, propose blocks.
HotStuff · 2019 · Design paper
HotStuff: BFT Consensus in the Lens of Blockchain
A three-phase BFT protocol whose communication is linear in the number of replicas, because a leader collects a threshold signature instead of everyone talking to everyone. Diem used a variant. The paper is not that network.
HoneyBadgerBFT · 2016 · Design paper
The Honey Badger of BFT Protocols
An asynchronous atomic broadcast. It does not wait for a timeout to make progress, and threshold encryption stops a leader from reading a batch and then dropping the transactions it dislikes.
Narwhal and Tusk · 2022 · Design paper
Narwhal and Tusk: A DAG-based Mempool and Efficient BFT Consensus
Split the mempool from the consensus. Narwhal is a DAG of certified batches. Tusk picks a leader inside that DAG. Later Sui consensus descends from this split. The paper is not a Sui status report.
Snow White · 2017 · Design paper
Snow White: Robustly Reconfigurable Consensus
A proof-of-stake design in the sleepy model: honest nodes may be offline, and the set of stakeholders can change. It is an academic predecessor, not Cardano and not Ethereum.
Thunderella · 2017 · Design paper
Thunderella: Blockchains with Optimistic Instant Confirmation
A fast path and a slow path. If a large supermajority is honest and an accelerator proposes quickly, transactions confirm at network speed. If not, the protocol falls back to an underlying chain.
Proofs of space · 2015 · Design paper
Proofs of Space
A proof that a machine reserved storage, not that it burned energy on a puzzle. The verifier checks a small challenge. Chia is a later system that pairs this idea with a verifiable delay. The paper is not Chia.
Verifiable delay functions · 2018 · Design paper
Verifiable Delay Functions
A function that forces a wait. Evaluating it takes a set number of sequential steps. Checking the result is quick, and the output is unique. Parallel machines do not make the wait much shorter.
Gasper · 2020 · Design paper
Combining GHOST and Casper
An idealised proof-of-stake protocol that pairs a GHOST-style fork choice with Casper FFG finality. The paper is the design argument for Ethereum's beacon chain, not a status report on a later client or a later outage.
Prism · 2019 · Design paper
Deconstructing the Blockchain to Approach Physical Limits
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.
Streamlet · 2020 · Design paper
Streamlet: Textbook Streamlined Blockchains
A deliberately small consensus protocol: epochs, a leader, a vote, and a rule that three adjacent certified blocks on the same chain become final. The point is to show how little machinery the last few years of BFT designs actually need.
FruitChains · 2016 · Design paper
FruitChains: A Fair Blockchain
Nakamoto consensus can pay a minority coalition more than its share of hash power, which is the selfish-mining observation. FruitChains records transactions in 'fruit' that hang off the chain, and pays out over a window so honest hash power gets roughly honest rewards.
DAG-Rider · 2021 · Design paper
All You Need is DAG
Replicas reliably broadcast proposals into a round-structured DAG. Once the DAG is local, each replica can read a total order off it without another round of consensus messages. The paper is the asynchronous, optimally resilient version of that idea.
Bullshark · 2022 · Design paper
Bullshark: DAG BFT Protocols Made Practical
DAG-Rider is built for asynchrony and pays for it on the common path. Bullshark keeps a DAG and a local commit rule, but adds a fast path for when the network is timely. The paper also writes down a simpler partially synchronous version.
Ouroboros Genesis · 2018 · Design paper
Ouroboros Genesis: Composable Proof-of-Stake Blockchains with Dynamic Availability
Genesis gives a way to join late, when honest stake may be dynamic, without a checkpoint the protocol itself cannot justify.
Stake bleeding · 2018 · Design paper
Stake-Bleeding Attacks on Proof-of-Stake Blockchains
The paper shows a long-range style attack in which past stake keeps producing an alternative history unless the protocol makes that history obviously stale.
Bitcoin in asynchronous networks · 2017 · Design paper
Analysis of the Blockchain Protocol in Asynchronous Networks
The paper analyses Nakamoto consensus when the delay bound is not a clean round, and states how confirmation has to grow with that delay.
Stubborn mining · 2016 · Design paper
Stubborn Mining: Generalizing Selfish Mining and Combining with an Eclipse Attack
The paper generalises the withholding strategies and shows they compose with an eclipse attack that starves a node of honest blocks.
Proof-of-work security · 2016 · Design paper
On the Security and Performance of Proof of Work Blockchains
The paper builds a quantitative model of stale blocks, double-spends and selfish mining across proof-of-work parameters.
Dumbo · 2020 · Design paper
Dumbo: Faster Asynchronous BFT Protocols
Dumbo reduces the cost of the asynchronous path by improving the reliable broadcast and the binary agreement that HoneyBadger-style protocols stack together.
Bitcoin SoK · 2015 · Design paper
Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies
This systematisation names the stability and consensus questions, the client problems, and the open research problems as of its date. It is a map, not a new protocol.
SpaceMint · 2015 · Design paper
SpaceMint: A Cryptocurrency Based on Proofs of Space
SpaceMint elects a leader from plots of stored data. The quality of the stored answer, not a hash grind at block time, decides who may extend the chain.
Bitcoin as a ledger · 2017 · Design paper
Bitcoin as a Transaction Ledger: A Composable Treatment
The paper gives a composable ledger functionality and shows that a bitcoin-like protocol realises it under stated assumptions.