An Enhanced Blockchain Consensus Mechanism Using Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake

Blockchain is a composite technology that combines cryptography and consensus algorithms to solve traditional distributed database synchronization problem. Due to the features like immutability and traceability, blockchain is considered to be a reliable platform to store shared information. It is an integral part of various modern multi-field infrastructures, including cryptocurrency. The popularity of blockchain gained spectacularly after the introduction of Bitcoin in the financial world. The consensus mechanism used in Bitcoin, called Proof-of-Work (PoW), also received a similar acceptance and even used in the present blockchain technologies. However, PoW has faced criticism for being less responsive to transaction throughput and for demanding huge computational power. In this paper, we make an attempt to improve the PoW mechanism by incorporating it with another popular consensus mechanism called Proof-of-Stake (PoS). From our experiments, it is observed that such a collaboration can greatly improve the block creation time in the blockchain network and also increase fairness as both higher computational power owners and higher stakeholders get a fair chance to contribute to the chain.