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Fair and Decentralized Committee Selection: Deterministic Bounds for Scalable Distributed Ledgers

delete2026-07-23
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OA
AI
G
Grigorii Melnikov
S
Sebastian Mueller
N
Nikita Polyanskii
Y
Yury Yanovich
DOI:10.1016/j.bcra.2026.100541delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Consensus mechanisms are pivotal to the scalability and decentralization of distributed ledger systems. Many blockchain systems employ weighted lotteries based on scarce resources like stake, storage, or computing power to select committees responsible for consensus and ledger updates. Ensuring a robust and fair committee selection process is critical for maintaining security, efficiency, and decentralization. While existing protocols offer only probabilistic guarantees, this paper introduces deterministic fairness and decentralization bounds for fixed-size committee selection. We formalize fairness–where a participant’s expected voting power equals their initial weight–and decentralization as a quantitative measure bounding maximum influence. Our key theorem proves that when an adversary controls less than a specified threshold of weight, our methods guarantee an honest committee majority. We propose four novel algorithms (Stitch, Cumulative Rejection Sampling, Weighted Rejection Sampling, and Representative Electoral College) that achieve fairness while offering distinct trade-offs between decentralization, computational complexity, and verifiability. Numerical experiments under realistic weight distributions demonstrate practical viability for typical blockchain parameters. This work provides system designers with a foundation for robust committee selection, replacing probabilistic assurances with deterministic security bounds for applications like atomic broadcast and randomness beacons.
Keywords:
Blockchain
Committee Selection
Cryptographic Sortition
Decentralization
Fairness

Journal

Blockchain-Research and Applications cover
Blockchain-Research and Applications
IF:
5.6
Papers:
310
Citations:
754

Organization

I
iota foundation
Scholars:
2
Papers: 1
Citations: 0
G
gearbox foundation
Scholars:
2
Papers: 1
Citations: 0
S
skolkovo institute of science and technology
Scholars:
235
Papers: 96
Citations: 0
A
Aix-Marseille Université and CNRS
Scholars:
8
Papers: 6
Citations: 0
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