Conference Paper Presentation at BRAINS 2025

At the conference, Frederic von Normann delivered a talk on our paper, “On the Trade-Off between Degree of Decentralization and Scalability in Proof-of-Stake–based Blockchain Systems,” hosted by the University of Zürich, UZH Blockchain Center.

In his presentation, Frederic highlighted our empirical investigation into the inherent tension between the degree of decentralization (DoD) and scalability in proof-of-stake blockchain systems. As blockchain technology becomes increasingly relevant across diverse domains—such as finance, energy, and beyond—this long-recognized trade-off remains a central design challenge.

While conceptual research has identified the existence of this trade-off, it has remained unclear how these tensions manifest under different system configurations, or how they can be consistently measured. Our work addresses this gap by providing empirical evidence and metrics that illustrate how practitioners can tune key parameters to achieve optimal system configurations based on desired quality attributes.

This research contributes to supporting software architects and system designers in developing Pareto-optimal, requirement-driven configurations for proof-of-stake blockchain systems. The paper will be published in the forthcoming conference proceedings.