Recent Advances in DAG-based Protocols with Kartik Nayak | a16z crypto Research Series
Source: YouTube · a16z crypto · published Nov 17, 2025 · 55:44
DAG-based protocols solve leader bottlenecks in blockchain consensus by naturally distributing work across all parties, though they incur higher communication complexity 6:30. Kartik Nayak presents Selfish, a DAG protocol that improves latency while maintaining throughput advantages over traditional leader-based systems 7:44.
Key Takeaways:
• Traditional leader-based protocols face work imbalance and progress issues when leaders fail 4:50
• DAG protocols ensure all parties perform similar work, eliminating leader bottlenecks 6:30
• Selfish commits leader vertices in 1 RBC + 1 delta time, improving on prior DAG protocols 16:34
• Experiments show Selfish maintains lower latency than prior DAG protocols even at 50 nodes 20:01
• Protocol selection requires balancing communication complexity, latency, network size, and real-world requirements 31:04
Protocol choice remains complex with trade-offs between theoretical metrics and practical deployment needs 36:00.
Sources:
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First 800 characters of the transcript
Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to our next A16Z crypto research seminar. Very pleased to introduce Cartik Nyak uh who got his PhD from Maryland. Uh he's now an associate tenure professor at um Duke University, also an adviser for espresso systems which is very cool. um he's done sort of work all across security applied cryptography you know consensus lots of areas super relevant to blockchain protocols and today we get the latest update on the progress on DAG based protocols so Cartik >> thank you so much Tim for the kind introduction and thank you so much for inviting me so I'm very very excited to be here so I would mention that this is like the first time ever that you know one of my PhD advisers one of my postoc advisers and my closest collaborator are in the same room for five days …