Red Belly Blockchain

We present the Balance Attack that can lead an adversary to double spend coins in proof-of-work blockchains. The Balance Attack bridges the gap between attacks that require to partition the network and attacks that require high mining power as it shows that one needs less mining power if it can delay network messages longer. We show that the attack succeeds with high probability even when the adversary has a less than half of the mining power. We also analyze theoretically the probability of success of the attack depending on the difficulty of the crypto-puzzle that the proof-of-work solves, the network delay that the attacker introduces and the mining power of the attacker. 

The Red Belly Blockchain enforces integrity initially rather than  recovering from inconsistencies, hence avoiding double spending. The list of participants is adjusted as necessary on the fly, hence bridging the gap between public and private blockchains.  Allocating permissions has never been simpler. Restrict the visibility, allow members to update, or offer your blockchain to the Internet.

 The Red Belly Blockchain offers unprecedented throughput of more than 600 thousands transactions per second (an order of magnitude faster than Visa). Its safety aspect is of invaluable importance for critical industries, like banking, and offers performance that scales horizontally.

Our researchers in collaboration with Data61-CSIRO, demonstrated the limitations of forkable blockchains (like Bitcoin and Ethereum) and how one can issue a Balance Attack to double spend, which consists of stealing assets from the blockchain.