Stability of local tip pool sizes
Provides theoretical stability guarantees for DAG-based ledgers, a foundational problem for blockchain scalability.
This paper proves that in DAG-based distributed ledgers with heterogeneous propagation delays, the tip pool size is stable (positive Harris recurrent) and has stationary exponential moments, establishing a unique stationary regime. Simulations illustrate the effects of delay variability.
In directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based distributed ledgers, unreferenced blocks (tips) form the backlog of a distributed queueing system. Each new block creates one tip and attempts to remove up to $k$ existing tips by referencing them. With heterogeneous propagation delays, these service decisions are made from delayed local information, so nodes may disagree on the backlog and some reference attempts are wasted. We study a continuous-time Poisson model with bounded heterogeneous delays and uniform tip selection. We prove that the embedded tip-configuration chain is irreducible, aperiodic, and positive Harris recurrent, and hence admits a unique stationary regime. The observer and local tip-pool sizes have stationary exponential moments, converge to their stationary limits, and satisfy almost-sure ergodic averages. We also derive a Little-type identity relating the stationary mean observer tip count to the mean time until a typical block is first referenced. Simulations are included as qualitative illustrations of the effects of delay variability and issuance heterogeneity.