The Tragedy of Chain Commons

2026-02-23

AI Summary

This work addresses a critical trade-off in modular blockchains, where decoupling consensus from execution enhances performance but introduces vulnerabilities such as persistent invalid transactions and novel strategic attacks like gaslighting. We present the first formal analysis of this decoupling mechanism, rigorously establishing the existence of gaslighting attacks and demonstrating an inherent tension between security and resource efficiency. Building on these insights, we propose an intermediate model that balances safety and performance, along with a gaslighting-resistant leader election protocol. Our design achieves high throughput and low latency while preserving Byzantine fault tolerance, thereby formalizing an “impossibility triangle” among security, efficiency, and integrity in decoupled blockchain architectures.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrencies
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems

Abstract

Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus forms the foundation of many modern blockchains striving for both high throughput and low latency. A growing bottleneck is transaction execution and validation on the critical path of consensus, which has led to modular decoupled designs that separate ordering from execution: Consensus orders only metadata, while transactions are executed and validated concurrently. While this approach improves performance, it can leave invalid transactions in the ledger, increasing storage costs and enabling new forms of strategic behavior. We present the first systematic study of this setting, providing a formal framework to reason about the interaction between consensus and execution. Using this framework, we show that the decoupled design enables a previously unidentified attack, which we term gaslighting. We prove a fundamental trade-off between resilience to this attack and resource capacity utilization, where both are impossible to achieve deterministically in the decoupled model. To address this trade-off, we discuss an intermediate model for leader-based protocols that is robust to gaslighting attacks while achieving high throughput and low latency.

Problem

• Byzantine Fault Tolerant
• modular blockchain
• decoupled consensus
• gaslighting attack
• transaction validation

Innovation

• Byzantine Fault Tolerance
• Decoupled Consensus
• Gaslighting Attack
• Consensus-Execution Trade-off
• Leader-based Protocol