Light Clients: How Efficient Can An Accountable Protocol Be?

This event took place on Tuesday, November 29, 2022 at 2:10 PM UTC.

Builder space B--A major challenge for blockchain interoperability is having an on-chain light client protocol that is both efficient and secure. We present a protocol that provides short proofs about the state of a decentralised consensus protocol while being able to detect misbehaving parties. To do this naively, a verifier would need to maintain an updated list of all participants' public keys which makes the corresponding proofs long. In general, existing solutions either lack accountability or are not efficient. We define and design an accountable light client system as the main cryptographic core for building bridges between proof of stake blockchains. We do this by using custom designed SNARKs. Additionally, we implement a prototype of our custom SNARKs for which we provide benchmarks.