ConsensusDay 22

Consensus — loosely defined as global agreement on the state of a decentralised network across its mutually untrusting participants — has been at the heart of decentralised systems ever since the inception of Nakamoto’s Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus. At the same time, its scalability remains the Achilles' heel of decentralised systems.

A number of ongoing R&D efforts aim at scaling blockchain networks up to 10s to 100s of thousands of transactions per second. Yet such performance targets can be seen as modest when the goal is to bring traditional web workloads to the decentralised web (Web3), requiring the handling of billions of transactions per second, large volumes of data, complex workloads, and hard latency requirements.

The goal of this event, ConsensusDay 22, is to foster scientific exchange across a wider community in consensus research and adjacent fields, by disseminating and providing a forum for discussion of upcoming impactful research with a practical twist. Topics of interest span the entirety of decentralised system scaling, including but not limited to:

• Sharding
• Consensus protocols
• Parallel execution
• Reconfiguration of consensus protocols
• CRDTs and consistency semantics weaker than total order
• Security/scalability tradeoffs
• Interoperability across blockchain systems
• Novel approaches to Sybil attack protection
• Scalable VDFs, VRFs and other cryptographic primitives