Atomic Appends in Asynchronous ByzantineDistributed Ledgers

Abstract

There has been a great interest recently in the so-called crypto-technologies (e.g.,blockchain systems [5]), and distributed ledger technology (DLT) in general [8],which are becoming very popular and are expected to have a high impact in multiple aspects of our everyday life. Although such a recent popularity is primarily due to the explosive growth of numerous crypto-currencies, there are many applications of this core technology that are outside the financial industry. These applications arise from leveraging various useful features provided by distributed ledgers, such as a decentralized information management, immutable record keeping for possible audit trail, robustness, availability, security, and privacy (see, for instance, [4, 6, 7]). However, there are many different DLT-based systems, and new ones are proposed almost everyday. Hence, it is extremely unlikely that a single DLT will prevail. This is forcing the DLT community to accept that it is inevitable to come up with ways to make DLTs interconnect and interoperate.