Cumulus: A Secure BFT-based Sidechain for Off-chain Scaling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sidechains enable off-chain scaling by sending transactions in a private network rather than broadcasting them in the public blockchain (i.e., the mainchain) network. To this end, classic Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols such as PBFT seem an excellent fit to fuel sidechains for their permissioned settings and inherent robustness. However, designing a secure and efficient BFT-based sidechain protocol remains an open challenge.This paper presents Cumulus, a novel BFT-based sidechain framework for blockchains to achieve off-chain scaling without compromising any security and efficiency properties of both sides’ consensus protocols. Cumulus encompasses a novel cryptographic sortition algorithm called Proof-of-Wait to fairly select sidechain nodes to communicate with the mainchain in an efficient and decentralized manner. To further reduce the operational cost, Cumulus provides an optimistic checkpointing approach in which the mainchain will not verify checkpoints unless disputes happen. Meanwhile, end-users enjoy a two-step withdrawal protocol, ensuring that they can safely collect assets back to the mainchain without relying on the BFT committee. Our experiments show that Cumulus sidechains outperform ZK-Rollup, another promising sidechain construction, achieving one and two orders of magnitude improvement in throughput and latency while retaining comparable operational cost.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".