A Survey on Blockchain Consensus with a Performance Comparison of PoW, PoS and Pure PoS

Abstract

Blockchain technology started as the backbone for cryptocurriencies and it has emerged as one of the most interesting technologies of the last decade. It is a new paradigm able to modify the way how industries transact. Today, the industries’ concern is about their ability to handle a high volume of data transactions per second while preserving both decentralization and security. Both decentralization and security are guaranteed by the mathematical strength of cryptographic primitives. There are two main approaches to achieve consensus: the Proof-of-Work based blockchains—PoW—and the Proof-of-Stake—PoS. Both of them come with some pros and drawbacks, but both rely on cryptography. In this survey, we present a review of the main consensus procedures, including the new consensus proposed by Algorand: Pure Proof-of-Stake—Pure PoS. In this article, we provide a framework to compare the performances of PoW, PoS and the Pure PoS, based on throughput and scalability.