NYC Gazette

Computer scientists from New York University have introduced a new blockchain system named Bounce, aimed at overcoming the limitations of traditional blockchain technologies. Bounce leverages satellite technology to optimize the order of transactions, resulting in significant advancements in speed, security, and energy efficiency.

Dennis Shasha, a professor at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and senior author of the research published in MDPI Network, explained, “The benefit of satellites is that they are hard to access, are secure against side-channel attacks, and their processing can be made tamper-resistant.” He further noted that the Bounce protocol could be encoded into read-only memory in satellite computers to prevent software injection attacks.

Despite the potential challenges of real-world implementation, Shasha, who is also the associate director of NYU Wireless, emphasized that, “Bounce provides a foundation for future research and development of high-performance, energy-efficient, globally accessible blockchain systems.”

The system's throughput allows it to process more than five million transactions every two seconds and confirms transactions within three to ten seconds. This throughput surpasses that of Solana, a prominent blockchain system, by 30 to 100 times. Additionally, Bounce's energy consumption is remarkably efficient at less than 1/10th of a joule per transaction, significantly lower than Solana's energy consumption of over 1,000 joules per transaction and Bitcoin's usage of over one million joules.

A key aspect of the Bounce protocol is its use of satellites to partition time slots for blockchain transactions, preventing issues such as "forks," which occur when a blockchain splits into multiple chains, potentially allowing unauthorized actions like "double-spending."

Experiments verifying the model's effectiveness were conducted via CloudLab, supported by the National Science Foundation's Cloud Access program. The use of the International Space Station facilitated ground-to-satellite communication tests.

The research was a collaborative effort with contributions from Xiaoteng Liu, an NYU undergraduate, and Taegyun Kim, now a software engineer at Datadog, who was an NYU graduate student when the prototype was built. The study received support from NYU Wireless at the Tandon School of Engineering.