Proving and Rewarding Client Diversity to Strengthen Resilience of Blockchain Networks

Client diversity in the Ethereum blockchain refers to the use of multiple independent implementations of the Ethereum protocol. This effectively enhances network resilience by reducing reliance on any single software client implementation. With client diversity, a single bug cannot tear the whole network down. However, despite multiple production-grade client implementations being available, there is still a heavily skewed distribution of clients in Ethereum. This is a concern for the community. In this paper, we introduce a novel conceptual framework for client diversity. The core goal is to improve the network resilience as a systemic property. Our key insight is to leverage economic incentives and verifiable execution to encourage the adoption of minority clients, thereby fostering a more robust blockchain ecosystem. Concretely, we propose to unambiguously and provably identify the client implementation used by any protocol participant, and to use this information to incentivize the usage of minority clients by offering higher participation rewards. We outline a detailed blueprint for our conceptual framework, in the realm of Ethereum. Our proposal is a game changer for improving client diversity of blockchains. Ultimately, it applies to strengthening the resilience of any decentralized distributed systems.