Rethinking Collaborative Trust for Verifiably Decentralized Blockchain Systems

Despite the promise of decentralization, measurement studies have identified a conspicuous lack of decentralization in blockchains. Centralization has been observed in almost all layers of the blockchain, in decentralized applications, and in decentralized autonomous organizations. In many cases, it is practically impossible to definitively determine the extent of centralization in the system. While multiple works have proposed methods to decrease centralization, by and large blockchains continue to be significantly centralized. In this paper, we develop a general framework for building verifiably decentralized blockchain systems. Our framework is motivated by the core observation that the richness and diversity of collaborative interactions between users -- rather than resource uniformity -- captures the essence and extent of decentralization in a blockchain system. Existing blockchains do not have any incentive mechanisms to encourage inter-coalition collaboration, which directly contributes to centralization. We propose a novel reward design that incentivizes users to collaborate with other users without forming isolated coalitions. Technically, our method uses a Sybil-resistant asymmetric Shapley value for reward attribution within a collaboration group, and the theory of expander graphs for measuring and enforcing decentralization. Our framework is general and can be adapted to alleviate centralization in any layer, application, or decentralized organization. It also has important implications beyond the topic of centralization. For example, we show that our solution can naturally address the blockchain scalability problem. We also identify a new class of decentralized collaborative applications that have hitherto been unexplored in blockchains.