Catena: Efficient Non-equivocation via Bitcoin

A paper by Alin Tomescu and Srini Devadas, MIT CSAIL

Catena enables applications to start their own "micro-blockchain" within a blockchain like Bitcoin. Clients running on mobile phones can verify a micro-blockchain efficiently by only downloading tens of megabytes rather than 100 gigabytes of Bitcoin data. Because micro-blockchains are as hard to fork as the Bitcoin blockchain, they enable blockchain-based applications like Blockstack to run securely on small devices like mobile phones or internet-of-things (IoT) devices. Read the paper, which was accepted to the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy this May 22-24, 2017.