Components of the Bounce Protocol
Each Sending Station can transmit one or multiple Merkle Tree roots to the designated satellite for a specific time slot. The satellite then signs a sequence of these roots, which are subsequently disseminated to Broadcast Ground Stations, ensuring widespread distribution of the roots and their corresponding Merkle Trees. Blockchain technology was initially introduced nearly 35 years ago but gained significant attention in 2009 with the launch of Bitcoin, marking its entry into mainstream consumer usage. Despite its various applications, including payments, digital contracts, and supply chain management, traditional blockchain systems struggle with limited transaction rates, high energy consumption, and significant transaction fees. A team of researchers from New York University has conceptualized a novel blockchain framework named Bounce, which utilizes satellites to sequence blocks, each containing multiple transactions.
In the Bounce protocol, multiple blocks are sent to the satellite responsible for a designated time slot, where the satellite organizes these blocks and sends them back, a process referred to as “bouncing.” Dennis Shasha, a computer science professor at NYU’s Courant Institute and the senior researcher on this study, highlights the advantages of using satellites, noting their inaccessibility, resistance to side-channel attacks, and the potential for tamper-proof processing. He emphasizes that the simplicity of the Bounce protocol allows it to be embedded into read-only memory, effectively mitigating the risk of software injection attacks.
Shasha, who also serves as the associate director of NYU Wireless, acknowledges that while implementing this system in real-world scenarios may pose practical challenges, Bounce lays the groundwork for future advancements in high-performance, energy-efficient blockchain technologies that are accessible globally. The Bounce system is capable of processing over 5 million transactions every two seconds, with confirmation times ranging from three to ten seconds. This performance benchmark supersedes that of its closest competitor, Solana, by a factor of 30 to 100, establishing Bounce as a leader in speed. The energy expenditure for each transaction in Bounce is less than one-tenth of a joule, contrasting sharply with Solana’s consumption of over 1,000 joules per transaction, where one joule equates to one watt per second. Bitcoin, on the other hand, processes fewer than 100 transactions per second, incurring an energy cost exceeding one million joules per transaction.
The Bounce blockchain framework incorporates multiple satellites that manage time slots, which are the fundamental units of time in blockchain operations. By assigning the satellite for each time slot to arrange the blocks it receives, the Bounce system entirely eliminates the possibility of “forks.” A fork occurs when a blockchain diverges into two or more chains, enabling scenarios such as the “double-spending” attack, where identical funds may be used to purchase different items. The researchers validated the effectiveness of their model through experiments conducted on CloudLab, a platform supported by the National Science Foundation’s Cloud Access program, allowing for the construction and testing of advanced computing platforms. Communication times from Earth to satellite were measured using the International Space Station.
