CEA-List, a pioneer in blockchain research, is helping to guarantee the reliability of energy-efficient proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanisms. This research responds to demand among CEA-List partners for solutions to help them reduce their environmental impacts.
Blockchain technology, best known as a means of proof for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, allows network participants to maintain a distributed shared history of contracts and transactions without going through a central authority. Transactions are organized in a chain of blocks, each of which must be validated by a certain number of participants, called validators, using one of the different protocols available.
Bitcoin has historically used the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus in which the validation of a block in the chain is associated with a random mathematical problem requiring validators to deploy substantial and energy-intensive computing resources. Validators’ investment in hardware and energy is rewarded with a predetermined amount of the cryptocurrency (or asset) associated with the blockchain.
The problem, in short, is that PoW uses a lot of energy, which raises major environmental concerns. Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols are different. Validators pledge their own assets to verify transactions, which uses mush less energy. If a minority participant tries to validate a fraudulent transaction on the blockchain, the currency he or she put up is lost. This effectively penalizes fraud and rewards correct validation.
PoS is more susceptible to manipulation than PoW, however. CEA-List is working with academic research labs and with companies to develop blockchains that are both energy-efficient and reliable by detecting vulnerabilities in existing protocols and developing new secure protocols.
CEA-List has been conducting theoretical research on PoS and investigating ways to detect vulnerabilities in pre-existing blockchain implementations since 2018. This research has led to the identification and correction of critical security flaws.
The Fantastyc project, which combines CEA-List’s trusted distributed systems know-how with expertise in artificial intelligence and cryptography, is developing a breakthrough use case for blockchain technology: trusted federated learning.
In federated learning, multiple participants can share data used to train an AI without revealing the contents of the data. By storing multiple participants’ contributions in a distributed yet traceable manner, blockchain can transform federated learning into trusted learning. For companies, for instance, the contributions of all employees could be validated using blockchain. Bad actors could also be identified more easily, such as during an audit.
Fantastyc discourages fraud by providing an unimpeachable audit trail.
CEA-List has partnered with academic labs and companies to develop multiple variants of Tendermint to make the protocol more resilient to network instabilities and attempted fraud.
CEA-List’s innovations were effectively implemented on both of these blockchains.