Support Ticket Mechanism (STM): Decoupling Proof-of-Work–based history security from block production
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Classical blockchain consensus designs tightly couple history security to block production , causing work to be irreversibly wasted during forks and requiring either winner-takes-all Proof-of-Work (PoW) races or heavyweight DAG-based validation to preserve work. Existing approaches therefore face a fundamental trade-off between energy efficiency, fork tolerance, and system complexity. We present the Support Ticket Mechanism (STM) , a work-accounting layer that decouples probabilistic history security from block production. Instead of embedding PoW directly into blocks, STM represents work as lightweight support tickets that can be reused across transient forks and included independently of fork-resolution outcomes, preserving cumulative work without requiring block-level PoW or DAG-wide validation. STM is combined with a Temporal Coordination Layer (TCL) that provides deterministic progress and liveness recovery through exception-only voting, without relying on PoW leader races or BFT-style block agreement. We evaluate the integrated design using Monte-Carlo simulation under realistic network delay, leader failure, and concurrent block production. The results show that the protocol maintains progress under stress, bounds fork depth and duration, preserves the vast majority of generated work even under heavy fork pressure, and achieves fair reward distribution when capacity and window parameters are properly dimensioned. These findings demonstrate that STM enables efficient, fork-tolerant history security while retaining the simplicity of chain-based ledgers, bridging the gap between classical PoW and DAG-based designs.
Institution: Karabük University
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,800
OpenAlex ID: W7140983033