ABSTRACT
International payments are slow and expensive, in part because of multi-hop payment routing through heterogeneous banking systems. Stellar is a new global payment network that can directly transfer digital money anywhere in the world in seconds. The key innovation is a secure transaction mechanism across untrusted intermediaries, using a new Byzantine agreement protocol called SCP. With SCP, each institution specifies other institutions with which to remain in agreement; through the global interconnectedness of the financial system, the whole network then agrees on atomic transactions spanning arbitrary institutions, with no solvency or exchange-rate risk from intermediary asset issuers or market makers. We present SCP's model, protocol, and formal verification; describe the Stellar payment network; and finally evaluate Stellar empirically through benchmarks and our experience with several years of production use.
- [n.d.]. Atomic cross-chain trading. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Atomic_cross-chain_trading.Google Scholar
- [n.d.]. Directo a México Frequently Asked Questions. https://www.frbservices.org/assets/resources/financial-services/directomexicofaq.pdf.Google Scholar
- [n.d.]. ERC20 Token Standard. https://theethereum.wiki/w/index.php/ERC20_Token_Standard.Google Scholar
- [n.d.]. PoET 1.0 Specification. https://sawtooth.hyperledger.org/docs/core/releases/latest/architecture/poet.html.Google Scholar
- [n.d.]. Stellar network visibility. https://stellarbeat.io.Google Scholar
- 2015. Merged mining specification. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Merged_mining_specification.Google Scholar
- 2017. MobileCoin. https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf.Google Scholar
- 2017. Mobius: A Universal Protocol Suite for the Blockchain Ecosystem and Real World Data. https://crushcrypto.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MOBI-Whitepaper.pdf.Google Scholar
- 2018. The BitShares Blockchain. https://github.com/bitshares-foundation/bitshares.foundation/blob/master/download/articles/BitSharesBlockchain.pdf.Google Scholar
- 2018. ZenCash Statement On Double Spend Attack. https://blog.zencash.com/zencash-statement-on-double-spend-attack/.Google Scholar
- 2019. An Introduction to Libra. https://libra.org/en-US/white-paper/.Google Scholar
- 2019. PoW 51% Attack Cost. https://www.crypto51.app (retrieved Aug. 29, 2019).Google Scholar
- 2019. Remittance Prices Worldwide. Issue 30. https://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/rpw_report_june_2019.pdf.Google Scholar
- 2019. SWIFT in Figures July 2019. https://www.swift.com/about-us/swift-fin-traffic-figures/monthly-figures.Google Scholar
- Hussam Abboud. 2018. The Realistic Lucrative Case of Ethereum Classic attack---Today. (May 2018). https://medium.com/@HusamABBOUD/the-realistic-lucrative-case-of-ethereum-classic-attack-with-1mm-today-8fa0430a7c25.Google Scholar
- Hamza Abusalah, Joël Alwen, Bram Cohen, Danylo Khilko, Krzysztof Pietrzak, and Leonid Reyzin. 2017. Beyond Hellman's Time-Memory Trade-Offs with Applications to Proofs of Space. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2017/893. https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/893.Google Scholar
- Giuseppe Ateniese, Ilario Bonacina, Antonio Faonio, and Nicola Galesi. 2014. Proofs of Space: When Space Is of the Essence. In Security and Cryptography for Networks, Michel Abdalla and Roberto De Prisco (Eds.). 538--557.Google Scholar
- Giuseppe Ateniese, Randal Burns, Reza Curtmola, Joseph Herring, Lea Kissner, Zachary Peterson, and Dawn Song. 2007. Provable Data Possession at Untrusted Stores. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '07). 598--609. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Rachel Banning-Lover. 2015. Boatfuls of cash: how do you get money into fragile states? http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/feb/19/boatfuls-of-cash-how-do-you-get-money-into-fragile-states.Google Scholar
- Nicolas Barry, Giuliano Losa, David Mazieres, Jed McCaleb, and Stanislas Polu. 2018. The Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP). Internet-Draft draft-mazieres-dinrg-scp-05. IETF Secretariat. http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-mazieres-dinrg-scp-05.txt http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-mazieres-dinrg-scp-05.txt.Google Scholar
- Thorsten Beck and María Soledad Martínez Peria. 2011. What Explains the Cost of Remittances? An Examination across 119 Country Corridors. The World Bank Economic Review 25, 1 (2011), 105--131.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Bitbond. 2019. Securities Prospectus. https://www.bitbondsto.com/.Google Scholar
- Joseph Bonneau. 2018. Hostile blockchain takeovers. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Bitcoin and Blockchain Research. http://www.jbonneau.com/doc/B18a-BITCOIN-why_buy_when_you_can_rent.pdfGoogle Scholar
- Gabriel Bracha. 1987. Asynchronous Byzantine Agreement Protocols. Information and Computation 75 (1987), 130--143.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Danny Bradbury. 2013. Feathercoin hit by massive attack. http://www.coindesk.com/feathercoin-hit-by-massive-attack/.Google Scholar
- Vitalik Buterin. 2013. Bitcoin Network Shaken by Blockchain Fork. (March 2013). https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-network-shaken-by-blockchain-fork-1363144448/.Google Scholar
- Vitalik Buterin. 2014. Slasher: A Punitive Proof-of-Stake Algorithm. https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/01/15/slasher-a-punitive-proof-of-stake-algorithm/.Google Scholar
- Vitalik Buterin and Virgil Griffith. 2017. Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget. arXiv:1710.09437. http://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09437.Google Scholar
- Christian Cachin and Björn Tackmann. 2019. Asymmetric Distributed Trust. arXiv:arXiv:1906.09314 https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.09314.Google Scholar
- Miguel Castro, Peter Druschel, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Animesh Nandi, Antony Rowstron, and Atul Singh. 2003. SplitStream: High-bandwidth Multicast in Cooperative Environments. In Proceedings of the 19th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. 298--313.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Miguel Castro and Barbara Liskov. 2002. Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance and Proactive Recovery. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 20, 4 (Nov. 2002), 398--461.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Stephen Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz. 2018. The stubbornly high cost of remittances. https://voxeu.org/article/stubbornly-high-cost-remittances.Google Scholar
- Brad Chase and Ethan MacBrough. 2018. Analysis of the XRP Ledger Consensus Protocol. arXiv:1802.07242. https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07242v1.Google Scholar
- David D. Clark, John Wroclawski, Karen R. Sollins, and Robert Braden. 2005. Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow's Internet. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 13, 3 (June 2005), 462--475.Google ScholarCross Ref
- REPO Coin. [n.d.]. Bringing the $1 billion auto repossession industry onto the blockchain. https://www.repocoin.io/docs/Repo%20Coin-WhitePaper.pdf.Google Scholar
- coins.ph. 2019. Cardless ATM Instant Cash Out. https://coins.ph/atm-cash-pickup/ (retrieved Aug. 29, 2019).Google Scholar
- crazyearner. 2013. TERRACOIN ATTACK OVER 1.2TH ATTACK CONFIRMD [sic]. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=261986.0.Google Scholar
- Jan Cronje. 2017. High bank charges force immigrants to send money home "hand-to-hand". https://www.groundup.org.za/article/high-bank-charges-force-immigrants-send-money-home-hand-hand/.Google Scholar
- Phil Daian, Rafael Pass, and Elaine Shi. 2016. Snow White: Provably Secure Proofs of Stake. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2016/919. https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/919.Google Scholar
- Ivan Damgård, Yvo Desmedt, Matthias Fitzi, and Jesper Buus Nielsen. 2007. Secure Protocols with Asymmetric Trust. In Advances in Cryptology - ASIACRYPT 2007, Kaoru Kurosawa (Ed.). Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, 357--375.Google Scholar
- Kourosh Davarpanah, Dan Kaufman, and Ophelie Pubellier. 2015. NeuCoin: the First Secure, Cost-efficient and Decentralized Cryptocurrency. http://www.neucoin.org/en/whitepaper/download.Google Scholar
- Cynthia Dwork, Nancy Lynch, and Larry Stockmeyer. 1988. Consensus in the Presence of Partial Synchrony. Journal of the ACM 35, 2 (April 1988), 288--323.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor. 1992. Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Cryptology Conference on Advances in Cryptology. 139--147.Google Scholar
- Stefan Dziembowski, Sebastian Faust, Vladimir Kolmogorov, and Krzysztof Pietrzak. 2013. Proofs of Space. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2013/796. https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/796.Google Scholar
- Ittay Eyal, Adem Efe Gencer, Emin Gün Sirer, and Robbert Van Renesse. 2016. Bitcoin-NG: A Scalable Blockchain Protocol. In Proceedings of the 13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. Santa Clara, CA, 45--59.Google Scholar
- Ittay Eyal and Emin Gün Sirer. 2013. Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable. http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243.Google Scholar
- Eli Gafni, Giuliano Losa, and David Mazières. 2019. Stellar Consensus By Instantiation. In 33nd International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2019). Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik.Google Scholar
- Juan Garay, Aggelos Kiayias, and Nikos Leonardos. 2015. The Bitcoin Backbone Protocol: Analysis and Applications. In Advances in Cryptology - EUROCRYPT 2015. 281--310.Google Scholar
- Álvaro García-Pérez and Alexey Gotsman. 2018. Federated Byzantine Quorum Systems. In 22nd International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2018). Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik.Google Scholar
- David K. Gifford. 1979. Weighted Voting for Replicated Data. In Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '79). 150--162. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Yossi Gilad, Rotem Hemo, Silvio Micali, Georgios Vlachos, and Nickolai Zeldovich. 2017. Algorand: Scaling Byzantine Agreements for Cryptocurrencies. In Proceedings of the 26th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '17). 51--68. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Rachid Guerraoui and Marko Vukolić. 2010. Refined quorum systems. Distributed Computing 23, 1 (2010), 1--42.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Guy Golan Gueta, Ittai Abraham, Shelly Grossman, Dahlia Malkhi, Benny Pinkas, Michael K. Reiter, Dragos-Adrian Seredinschi, Orr Tamir, and Alin Tomescu. 2018. SBFT: a Scalable Decentralized Trust Infrastructure for Blockchains. arXiv:1804.01626v1. https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.01626v1.Google Scholar
- Dave Gutteridge. 2018. Japanese Cryptocurrency Monacoin Hit by Selfish Mining Attack. CCN (May 2018). https://www.ccn.com/japanese-cryptocurrency-monacoin-hit-by-selfish-mining-attack/.Google Scholar
- Carlos Hernández. 2019. Bitcoin Has Saved My Family. The New York Times (February 23 2019). https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/opinion/sunday/venezuela-bitcoin-inflation-cryptocurrencies.html.Google Scholar
- Ari Juels and Burton S. Kaliski, Jr. 2007. Pors: Proofs of Retrievability for Large Files. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '07). 584--597. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Flavio P. Junqueira, Keith Marzullo, Maurice Herlihy, and Lucia Draque Penso. 2010. Threshold protocols in survivor set systems. Distributed Computing 23, 2 (01 Oct 2010), 135--149. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Minjeong Kim, Yujin Kwon, and Yongdae Kim. 2019. Is Stellar As Secure As You Think?. In Proceedings of the IEEE Security & Privacy on the Blockchain.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Sunny King and Scott Nadal. 2012. PPCoin: Peer-to-Peer Crypto-Currency with Proof-of-Stake. http://peercoin.net/assets/paper/peercoin-paper.pdf.Google Scholar
- Joshua A Kroll, Ian C Davey, and Edward W Felten. 2013. The economics of Bitcoin mining, or Bitcoin in the presence of adversaries. In Proceedings of the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS).Google Scholar
- Jae Kwon. 2014. Tendermint: Consensus without Mining. http://tendermint.com/docs/tendermint.pdf.Google Scholar
- Łukasz Lachowski. 2019. Complexity of the Quorum Intersection Property of the Federated Byzantine Agreement System. https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.06493.Google Scholar
- Khin ThidaLatt, Yasuhiro Ohara, Satoshi Uda, and Yoichi Shinoda. 2010. Analysis of IP Prefix Hijacking and Traffic Interception. International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security 10, 7 (July 2010), 22--31.Google Scholar
- Jinyuan Li and David Mazières. 2007. Beyond One-third Faulty Replicas in Byzantine Fault Tolerant Systems. In Proceedings of the 4th Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. 131--144.Google Scholar
- Giuliano Losa. 2019. Formal Verification of SCP. https://github.com/stellar/scp-proofs.Google Scholar
- Ethan MacBrough. 2018. Cobalt: BFT Governance in Open Networks. arXiv:1802.07240v1. https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07240v1.Google Scholar
- Dahlia Malkhi and Michael Reiter. 1998. Byzantine quorum systems. Distributed Computing 11, 4 (01 Oct 1998), 203--213. Google ScholarDigital Library
- David Mazières. 2016. The Stellar Consensus Protocol: A Federated Model for Internet-level Consensus. (February 2016). https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf.Google Scholar
- Kenneth L. McMillan and Oded Padon. 2018. Deductive Verification in Decidable Fragments with Ivy. In International Static Analysis Symposium. Springer, 43--55.Google Scholar
- Andrew Miller, Yu Xia, Kyle Croman, Elaine Shi, and Dawn Song. 2016. The Honey Badger of BFT Protocols. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '16). 31--42. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Satoshi Nakamoto. 2008. Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.Google Scholar
- Moni Naor and Avishai Wool. 1998. The Load, Capacity, and Availability of Quorum Systems. SIAM J. Comput. 27, 2 (April 1998), 423--447. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Arvind Narayanan. 2015. Analyzing the 2013 Bitcoin fork: centralized decision-making saved the day. (July 2015). https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-bitcoin-fork-centralized-decision-making-saved-the-day/.Google Scholar
- Mark Nesbitt. 2019. Deep Chain Reorganization Detected on Ethereum Classic (ETC). Technical Report. The Coinbase Block. https://blog.coinbase.com/ethereum-classic-etc-is-currently-being-51-attacked-33be13ce32de.Google Scholar
- Tobias Nipkow, Lawrence C. Paulson, and Markus Wenzel. 2002. Isabelle/HOL: A Proof Assistant for Higher-Order Logic. Vol. 2283. Springer Science & Business Media.Google Scholar
- Karl J. O'Dwyer and David Malone. 2014. Bitcoin Mining and its Energy Footprint. In Irish Signals and Systems Conference. 280--285.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Patrick O'Neil, Edward Cheng, Dieter Gawlick, and Elizabeth O'Neil. 1996. The log-structured merge-tree (LSM-tree). Acta Informatica 33, 4 (June 1996), 351--385.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Oregon11. 2018. Re: Venmo to Paypal payments. https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/PayPal-Basics/Venmo-to-Paypal-payments/m-p/1520181#M15025.Google Scholar
- P4Titan. 2017. Slimcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Crypto-Currency with Proof-of-Burn. https://github.com/slimcoin-project/slimcoin-project.github.io/raw/master/whitepaperSLM.pdf.Google Scholar
- Oded Padon, Jochen Hoenicke, Giuliano Losa, Andreas Podelski, Mooly Sagiv, and Sharon Shoham. 2018. Reducing Liveness to Safety in First-Order Logic. In 45th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2018). Los Angeles.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Oded Padon, Jochen Hoenicke, Kenneth L. McMillan, Andreas Podelski, Mooly Sagiv, and Sharon Shoham. 2018. Temporal Prophecy for Proving Temporal Properties of Infinite-State Systems. In 2018 Formal Methods in Computer Aided Design (FMCAD). IEEE, 1--11.Google Scholar
- Oded Padon, Giuliano Losa, Mooly Sagiv, and Sharon Shoham. 2017. Paxos Made EPR: Decidable Reasoning About Distributed Protocols. Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 1, OOPSLA (Oct. 2017), 108:1--108:31.Google ScholarDigital Library
- José Parra Moyano and Omri Ross. 2017. KYC Optimization Using Distributed Ledger Technology. Business & Information Systems Engineering 59, 6 (01 Dec 2017), 411--423.Google Scholar
- Rafael Pass and Elaine Shi. 2017. Thunderella: Blockchains with Optimistic Instant Confirmation. Technical Report 2017/913. Cryptography ePrint Archive. https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/913.pdf.Google Scholar
- Poseidon. 2019. Climate Rescue: Empowering People to Save the Planet with Every Purachase. https://poseidon.eco/assets/documents/Poseidon-Climate-Rescue.pdf.Google Scholar
- Protocol Labs. 2017. Proof of Replication. https://filecoin.io/proof-of-replication.pdf.Google Scholar
- Ling Ren and Srinivas Devadas. 2016. Proof of Space from Stacked Expanders. In Proceedings, Part I, of the 14th International Conference on Theory of Cryptography - Volume 9985. 262--285. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Fred B. Schneider. 1990. Implementing Fault-tolerant Services Using the State Machine Approach: A Tutorial. ACM Comput. Surv. 22, 4 (Dec. 1990), 299--319. Google ScholarDigital Library
- David Schwartz, Noah Youngs, and Arthur Britto. 2014. The Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm. https://ripple.com/files/ripple_consensus_whitepaper.pdf.Google Scholar
- Hovav Shacham and Brent Waters. 2008. Compact Proofs of Retrievability. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security: Advances in Cryptology (ASIACRYPT '08). 90--107. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Isaac C. Sheff, Robbert van Renesse, and Andrew C. Myers. 2014. Distributed Protocols and Heterogeneous Trust: Technical Report. arXiv:1412.3136. https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.3136.Google Scholar
- Smartlands. [n.d.]. https://rise.smartlands.io/.Google Scholar
- Yee Jiun Song, Robbert van Renesse, Fred B. Schneider, and Danny Dolev. 2008. The Building Blocks of Consensus. In Distributed Computing and Networking, Shrisha Rao, Mainak Chatterjee, Prasad Jayanti, C. Siva Ram Murthy, and Sanjoy Kumar Saha (Eds.). 54--72.Google Scholar
- Robert H. Thomas. 1979. A Majority Consensus Approach to Concurrency Control for Multiple Copy Databases. ACM Transactions on Database Systems 4, 2 (June 1979), 180--209. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Greg Thomson. 2019. Coinbase Sides with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Miners on 51% Attack Smack. CCN. https://www.ccn.com/coinbase-bitcoin-cash-bch-miners-51-attack-smack/.Google Scholar
- VeridiumLabs. [n.d.]. https://www.veridium.io/.Google Scholar
- Josiah Wilmoth. 2018. Bitcoin Gold Hit by Double Spend Attack, Exchanges Lose Millions. CCN (May 2018). https://www.ccn.com/bitcoin-gold-hit-by-double-spend-attack-exchanges-lose-millions/.Google Scholar
- Josiah Wilmoth. 2018. Privacy Coin Verge Succumbs to 51% Attack [Again]. CCN (May 2018). https://www.ccn.com/privacy-coin-verge-succumbs-to-51-attack-again/.Google Scholar
- Maofan Yin, Dahlia Malkhi, Michael K. Reiter, Guy Golan Gueta, and Ittai Abraham. 2018. HotStuff: BFT Consensus in the Lens of Blockchain. arXiv:1803.05069. https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.05069.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Fast and secure global payments with Stellar
Recommendations
Double-spending fast payments in bitcoin
CCS '12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer and communications securityBitcoin is a decentralized payment system that relies on Proof-of-Work (PoW) to verify payments. Nowadays, Bitcoin is increasingly used in a number of fast payment scenarios, where the time between the exchange of currency and goods is short (in the ...
Bolt: Anonymous Payment Channels for Decentralized Currencies
CCS '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications SecurityBitcoin owes its success to the fact that transactions are transparently recorded in the blockchain, a global public ledger that removes the need for trusted parties. Unfortunately, recording every transaction in the blockchain causes privacy, latency, ...
Central Bank Digital Currency and Banking: Macroeconomic Benefits of a Cash-Like Design
Many central banks are considering issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC). How will the CBDC affect the macroeconomy? Will its design matter? To answer these questions, we theoretically and quantitatively assess the effects of a CBDC on ...
Comments