Incentivizing Consensus Propagation in Proof-of-Stake Based Consortium Blockchain Networks

Abstract

In proof-of-stake based consortium blockchain networks, pre-selected miners compete to solve a crypto-puzzle with a successfully mining probability proportional to the amount of their stakes. When the puzzle is solved, the miners are encouraged to take part in mined block propagation for verification to win a transaction fee from the blockchain user. The mined block should be propagated over wired or wireless networks, and be verified as quickly as possible to decrease consensus propagation delay. In this letter, we study incentivizing the consensus propagation considering the tradeoff between the network delay of block propagation process and offered transaction fee from the blockchain user. A Stackelberg game is then formulated to jointly maximize utility of the blockchain user and individual profit of the miners. The blockchain user acting as the leader sets the transaction fee for block verification. The miners acting as the followers decide on the number of recruited verifiers over wired or wireless networks. We apply the backward induction to analyze the existence and uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium. Performance evaluation validates the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed game model in consensus propagation.