# Prism: Deconstructing the Blockchain to Approach Physical Limits Content type: Research Paper Summary: Prism is a theoretical and practical proposal that deconstructs the traditional blockchain structure into modular components to reach the maximum limits of throughput and latency governed by physical network properties. The authors propose a parallelized block structure where miners produce blocks for different aspects of the protocol independently, rather than as a monolithic chain. By separating the roles of leader election, transaction processing, and data availability, the system approaches Key concepts: Vivek Bagaria, Sreeram Kannan, David Tse, Giulia Fanti, Pramod Viswanath, consensus, throughput, bandwidth, scalability, distributed networks
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Prism: Deconstructing the Blockchain to Approach Physical Limits

Vivek Bagaria, Sreeram Kannan, David Tse, Giulia Fanti, Pramod Viswanath

arXiv preprintJanuary 2019

Abstract

Prism is a theoretical and practical proposal that deconstructs the traditional blockchain structure into modular components to reach the maximum limits of throughput and latency governed by physical network properties. The authors propose a parallelized block structure where miners produce blocks for different aspects of the protocol independently, rather than as a monolithic chain. By separating the roles of leader election, transaction processing, and data availability, the system approaches the performance limits imposed by bandwidth and propagation delays. The paper rigorously demonstrates how this decomposition allows the network to handle an order of magnitude higher throughput than current consensus protocols while maintaining strong security guarantees. The model essentially scales with the available bandwidth of the nodes, rather than being restricted by the slowest participant or the consensus round time. Prism provides a critical blueprint for designing future protocols that prioritize performance as a fundamental constraint.

Key Findings

  • 1Deconstructs monolithic blockchains into parallelized functional components.
  • 2Scales transaction throughput linearly with network bandwidth.
  • 3Optimizes consensus by decoupling block production and transaction ordering.
  • 4Proposes a framework that reaches theoretical physical network limits.

Topics

consensusthroughputbandwidthscalabilitydistributed networks
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Citation

Vivek Bagaria, Sreeram Kannan, David Tse, Giulia Fanti, Pramod Viswanath (2019). Prism: Deconstructing the Blockchain to Approach Physical Limits. arXiv preprint. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.08097

BibTeX

@misc{prismdeconstructing2019,
  title = {Prism: Deconstructing the Blockchain to Approach Physical Limits},
  author = {Vivek Bagaria and Sreeram Kannan and David Tse and Giulia Fanti and Pramod Viswanath},
  year = {2019},
  howpublished = {\url{https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.08097}},
}

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