Right-of-Stake: Deterministic and Fair Blockchain Leader Election with Hidden Leader

Mainstream applications typically require a trusted authority where application clients will connect to obtain a service. In the blockchain decentralized environment, this trusted authority or the leader changes frequently and is selected randomly depending on the protocol. Such procedures may take an unacceptable amount of time or resources to establish the leader causing overheads, latency or processing issues if mainstream applications are to adopt the blockchain. Focusing on these issues, we present Right-of-Stake (RoS), a novel approach in a synchronous blockchain network to deterministically elect a leader or block proposer out of a group of participants, each with different stakes. This procedure is completed in a guaranteed equitable manner while removing the need for Proof-of-Work's (PoW) aggressive-resource computations or Proof-of-Stake's (PoS) inter-node negotiations. Besides, through the use of zero-knowledge range proofs, RoS has a distinct advantage of being able to hide the identity of future leaders until the point when the leader surfaces to propose the block. We also simulate RoS and show that it can recover from Denial-of-Service attacks which have been a point of contention in arguments against deterministic leader election protocols. We view RoS as a possible consensus replacement for blockchains that require an improved leader election process when deployed for mainstream applications.