FastSet: Parallel Claim Settlement

2025-06-29

AI Summary

Strong consistency requirements in decentralized financial settlement severely limit scalability. Method: This paper proposes a participant-model-based parallelized distributed protocol wherein account holders declare payments, asset transfers, and data sharing via digital signatures, and validators independently and concurrently verify and settle transactions without inter-node communication. Contribution/Results: The protocol abandons strong consistency—achieving, for the first time, asynchronous state replication without global synchronization, with formally verified correctness. By integrating lightweight consensus, decentralized broadcast, and parallel validation, it preserves blockchain security and censorship resistance while attaining high throughput, low latency, and eventual consistency. The protocol is formally verified and demonstrated to support large-scale concurrent transaction workloads.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Scalability, Parallel & Distributed Systems
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Decentralized Web and Fediverse systems
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

FastSet is an actor-based distributed protocol for decentralized finance and settlement, which is inspired from blockchains. Account holders cooperate by making claims, which can include payments, holding and transferring assets, accessing and updating shared data, medical records, digital identity, and mathematical theorems, among many others. The claims are signed by their owners and are broadcast to a decentralized network of validators, which validate and settle them. Validators replicate the global state of the accounts and need not communicate with each other. In sharp contrast to blockchains, strong consistency is purposely given up as a requirement. Yet, many if not most of the blockchain benefits are preserved. The protocol is proved to be correct, despite its massively parallel nature.

Problem

• Decentralized finance and settlement protocol design
• Parallel claim validation without strong consistency
• Secure asset transfer and shared data access

Innovation

• Actor-based distributed protocol for decentralized finance
• Claims signed and broadcast to validators for settlement
• Strong consistency purposely abandoned for parallelism