Blockchain abstract data type

Emmanuelle Anceaume (1) , Antonella del Pozzo (2) , Romaric Ludinard (3) , Maria Potop-Butucaru (4) , Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni (2)

1 CIDRE - Confidentialité, Intégrité, Disponibilité et Répartition
2 LIST (CEA) - Laboratoire d'Intégration des Systèmes et des Technologies
3 IMT Atlantique - IMT Atlantique
4 NPA - Networks and Performance Analysis

The presented work continues the line of recent distributed computing community efforts dedicated to the theoretical aspects of blockchains. This paper is the first to specify blockchains as a composition of abstract data types all together with a hierarchy of consistency criteria that formally characterizes the histories admissible for distributed programs that use them. Our work is based on an original oracle-based construction that, along with new consistency definitions, captures the eventual convergence process in blockchain systems. The paper presents as well some results on implementability of the presented abstractions and a mapping of representative existing blockchains from both academia and industry in our framework.

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Computer Science [cs]; Data Structures and Algorithms [cs.DS]; Computer Science [cs]; Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing [cs.DC]

Emmanuelle Anceaume, Antonella del Pozzo, Romaric Ludinard, Maria Potop-Butucaru, Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni. Blockchain abstract data type. SPAA 2019 - 31st ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures, Jun 2019, Phoenix, Arizona, United States. pp.349-358, ⟨10.1145/3323165.3323183⟩. ⟨hal-02380364⟩