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I recently published a paper entitled “A taxonomy of blockchain consensus protocols: A survey and classification framework” in Expert Systems with Applications.

Abstract. Blockchain, the underlying technology of Bitcoin, refers to the public ledger used in a distributed network. Because blockchain does not rely on a central authority, peers have to agree on the state of the ledger among themselves, i.e., they have to reach a consensus on the state of the transactions. The way nodes reach that consensus has gained incredible attention in the literature. Bitcoin uses the Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism, as did Ethereum at first. The latter decided to move from PoW to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) because of the high energy consumption required by PoW. To date, many other consensus protocols have been proposed to address the limitations of the seminal ones.

In this paper, we inform researchers and practitioners about the current state of consensus protocols research. The aim is to provide an analysis of the research introducing new consensus protocols in order to enable a more unified treatment. To that end, we review 28 new consensus protocols and we propose a four-category classification framework: Origin, Design, Performance and Security. We demonstrate the applicability of the framework by classifying the 28 protocols. Many surveys have already been proposed in the literature and some of them will be discussed later in the paper. Yet, we believe that this work is relevant and important for two reasons. Firstly, blockchain being a fast evolving topic, new consensus protocols emerge regularly and improvements are also put forward on a regular basis. Hence, this work aims at reflecting the latest state-of-the-art in terms of consensus protocols. Secondly, we aim to propose a comprehensive classification framework, integrating knowledge from multiple works in the literature, as well as introducing classification dimensions that have not been proposed before.

This work demonstrates that multiple consensus have been proposed in a short period of time, and highlights the differences between these protocols. Furthermore, it is suggested that researchers and practitioners who aim to propose consensus protocols in the future should pay attention to all the dimensions presented in the classification framework.

Feel free to share any comment or question you might have regarding the document itself or the topic in general.

bouraga-2020-taxonomy Download

The 2nd Conference on Blockchain Research & Applications for Innovative Networks and Services took place in September 2020 (BRAINS2020) was supposed to be held in Paris, but unfortunately due to the COVID-2019 pandemic, the conference had to be held virtually.

In my very first poster session, I’ve presented the poster you can see above which focuses on the prediction of gas for transactions on Ethereum. Obviously, the conditions were not ideal for exchanges with the other attendees, but the organizers did a great job in enabling interactions despite the virtual setting.

Abstract. The author uses data about transactions onEthereum as sources for studying the relationship between thehistoric of transactions for a given address and the amountof gas consumed for a transaction. The author combines dataabout transactions, and blocks to predict the gas usage for atransaction. Specifically, how much gas will be consumed for the next transaction, given the initiator’s transaction history. The results demonstrate the value of considering the transactionhistory for gas usage predictions.

Feel free to leave any comment or question you might have regarding this poster in itself or the topic of the poster.