Thundercore

Our Thunder protocol overcomes both of these issues, achieving both high throughput and fast confirmation time (under typical circumstances within 2 network roundtrips) while being robust up to a 50% attack.

While we are aware of several other recently suggested approaches for overcoming the above two bottlenecks, these approaches are either restricted to only payments (and do not handle smart contracts), or provide security only against a weaker 1/3-attack; additionally, many approaches are based on heuristic arguments, whereas our protocol is accompanied by a rigorous proof of security. The design of Thunder is inspired by a new theoretical paradigm for consensus proposed in our earlier work, Thunderella [21], and provides the first practical instantiation of this general paradigm. This paradigm can be instantiated using either Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake.