{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-process-calculus-for-formally-verifying","title":"A Process Calculus for Formally Verifying Blockchain Consensus Protocols","arxiv_id":"1911.08033","date":"2019-11-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Wolfgang Jeltsch"],"abstract":"Blockchains are becoming increasingly relevant in a variety of fields, such as finance, logistics, and real estate. The fundamental task of a blockchain system is to establish data consistency among distributed agents in an open network. Blockchain consensus protocols are central for performing this task. Since consensus protocols play such a crucial role in blockchain technology, several projects are underway that apply formal methods to these protocols. One such project is carried out by a team of the Formal Methods Group at IOHK. This project, in which the author is involved, aims at a formally verified implementation of the Ouroboros family of consensus protocols, the backbone of the Cardano blockchain. The first outcome of our project is the $\\natural$-calculus (pronounced \"natural calculus\"), a general-purpose process calculus that serves as our implementation language. The $\\natural$-calculus is a domain-specific language embedded in a functional host language using higher-order abstract syntax. This paper will be a ramble through the $\\natural$-calculus. First we will look at its language and its operational semantics. The latter is unique in that it uses a stack of two labeled transition systems to treat phenomena like data transfer and the opening and closing of channel scope in a modular fashion. The presence of multiple transition systems calls for a generic treatment of derived concurrency concepts. We will see how such a treatment can be achieved by capturing notions like scope opening and silent transitions abstractly using axiomatically defined algebraic structures based on functors and monads.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1911.08033v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.08033v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-process-calculus-for-formally-verifying","repo_url":"https://github.com/jeltsch/wflp-2019","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}