• Computer Science > Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing [Submitted on 23 Feb 2026] Title:The Tragedy of Chain Commons View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus forms the foundation of many modern blockchains striving for both high throughput and low latency. • A growing bottleneck is transaction execution and validation on the critical path of consensus, which has led to modular decoupled designs that separate ordering from execution: Consensus orders only metadata, while transactions are executed and validated concurrently. • While this approach improves performance, it can leave invalid transactions in the ledger, increasing storage costs and enabling new forms of strategic behavior. • We present the first systematic study of this setting, providing a formal framework to reason about the interaction between consensus and execution. • Using this framework, we show that the decoupled design enables a previously unidentified attack, which we term gaslighting. • We prove a fundamental trade-off between resilience to this attack and resource capacity utilization, where both are impossible to achieve deterministically in the decoupled model.

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  • Computer Science > Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing [Submitted on 23 Feb 2026] Title:The Tragedy of Chain Commons View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus forms the foundation of many modern blockchains striving for both high throughput and low latency. A growing bottleneck is transaction execution and validation on the critical path of consensus, which has led to modular decoupled designs that separate ordering from execution: Consensus orders only metadata, while transactions are executed and validated concurrently. While this approach improve

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