Heavy-coin Committee Selection for the Decentralized Era
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2026-08-20
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Abstract
Committee selection is a fundamental building block for enabling blockchains to scale. Most blockchains use the canonical design for committee selection, where committee members are chosen uniformly randomly, weighted by the stake of each node. Several recent breakthrough works [24, 45] interestingly show that the canonical design is not the only way to go. These works show that by deterministically including certain nodes in the committee, we can significantly reduce the committee size needed.
These recent designs [24, 45] however are meaningful only under highly-centralized stake distributions. If the stake distribution is more decentralized (i.e., with less wealth concentration), then they quickly degrade to the canonical design. As the central contribution of this work, we propose a novel heavy-coin committee selection scheme or HC scheme. For more decentralized distributions, our HC scheme is the first and only design that can do better than the classic canonical design. For other (highly-centralized) distributions, our HC scheme retains the benefits of the best existing design.