eRoc: A Distributed Blockchain System with Fast Consensus

A consensus mechanism is one of the most important techniques in blockchain systems. However, existing consensus mechanisms have the problems of high latency and tending to centralization. To address these issues, we present a consensus algorithm eRoc with decentralization property. In eRoc, a verifiable random function (VRF) is employed to achieve cryptographic sortition such that a certain amount of blocks and votes will be broadcasted in the system. And the blocks and votes will be verified by all users. Thus, in each round all blocks are generated in a distributed way, and each block must be voted by most voters to become a consensus block. We propose a generic eRoc construction, analyze its security and liveness, and compare with related schemes. We also develop an eRoc prototype in C++ to evaluate its performance. The experimental results demonstrate that eRoc can reach consensus in 13 seconds for 30 blocks of 2M size, where the numbers of nodes, expected votes of each block, and threshold votes of a consensus block are 10k, 500, and 200, respectively.

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