pjh177787 / prism-rust

Rust implementation of the Prism consensus protocol

Prism: Scaling Bitcoin by 10,000x

Rust implementation of the Prism consensus protocol.

Paper

Prism: Scaling Bitcoin by 10,000x [full text]

Lei Yang (MIT CSAIL), Vivek Bagaria 📧 (Stanford University), Gerui Wang (UIUC) 📧, Mohammad Alizadeh (MIT CSAIL), David Tse (Stanford University), Giulia Fanti (CMU), Pramod Viswanath (UIUC)

Abstract: Bitcoin is the first fully decentralized permissionless blockchain protocol and achieves a high level of security: the ledger it maintains has guaranteed liveness and consistency properties as long as the adversary has less compute power than the honest nodes. However, its throughput is only 7 transactions per second and the confirmation latency can be up to hours. Prism is a new blockchain protocol which is designed to achieve a natural scaling of Bitcoin's performance while maintaining its full security guarantees. We present an implementation of Prism which achieves a throughput of 70,000 transactions per second and confirmation latencies of tens of seconds.

Build

This project requires Rust nightly because some of our dependencies rely on nightly-only features like inline assembly.

To build the binary, run cargo build --release. The first build could take several mintues, mostly due to building RocksDB.

Testbed and Reproducing

The scripts used in the evaluation section of the paper are located in /testbed. /testbed/README.md provides instructions for running the experiments and reproducing the results. Or, watch the screencast for a quick demo