Winning the Caucus Race: Continuous Leader Election via Public Randomness
This addresses the need for efficient leader election in blockchain systems, offering a potentially more cost-effective alternative to proof-of-work, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing leader election concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of large-scale leader election in distributed ledgers by proposing Caucus, a protocol that avoids the computational cost of proof-of-work, and demonstrates that one variant costs only $0.10 per leader election when tested on an Ethereum private network.
Consensus protocols inherently rely on the notion of leader election, in which one or a subset of participants are temporarily elected to authorize and announce the network's latest state. While leader election is a well studied problem, the rise of distributed ledgers (i.e., blockchains) has led to a new perspective on how to perform large-scale leader elections via solving a computationally difficult puzzle (i.e., proof of work). In this paper, we present Caucus, a large-scale leader election protocol with minimal coordination costs that does not require the computational cost of proof-of-work. We evaluate Caucus in terms of its security, using a new model for blockchain-focused leader election, before testing an implementation of Caucus on an Ethereum private network. Our experiments highlight that one variant of Caucus costs only $0.10 per leader election if deployed on Ethereum.