Master Thesis
Analysis of Succinct Blockchain Systems
Succinct blockchains aim to reduce the storage and verification costs for participants without compromising the security of the ledger. Instead of storing and validating the full chain history, users verify a short proof that attests to the validity of a large number of blocks or even the entire state of the system. This paradigm enables lightweight clients, stateless validation, and scalable data availability, making it a promising direction for succinct decentralized systems. This thesis studies succinct blockchain protocols that use cryptographic proofs to ensure the integrity of the chain with sublinear complexity.
The focus will be on both the cryptographic and algorithmic design: how to combine proof systems with consensus and how to verify transitions across time with minimal state. Students may investigate concrete proposals such as the Mina protocol or Ethereum’s approach to stateless clients, as well as more abstract constructions based on accumulators or recursive proof systems. The thesis will compare these approaches and their underlying assumptions, and assess how succinctness influences decentralization and verifiability.
This project focuses on formal definitions, proof techniques, and system implications. Basic familiarity with cryptographic protocols and blockchain consensus is helpful but not required.
References
[1] Batching Techniques for Accumulators with Applications to IOPs and Stateless Blockchains
[2] Limits on revocable proof systems, with applications to stateless blockchains
[3] Quisquis: A New Design for Anonymous Cryptocurrencies
[4] Nopenena Untraceable Payments: Defeating Graph Analysis with Small Decoy Sets