Physical synchronisation for anomaly detection in epidemic blockchain consensus
File(s)
Published version (article in press)
Author(s)
Mordarski, Marcel
Magri, Luca
Knottenbelt, William
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Gossip protocols propagate information through peer-to-peer networks analogously to epidemic spreading, yet this analogy has remained informal. Here, we formalise it for blockchain consensus by means of a phase-encoding under which the dynamics reduce, at leading order and in a weak-coupling regime, to coupled-oscillator synchronisation on complex networks. Block preferences correspond to oscillator phases, communication latencies to natural frequencies, and network topology to the coupling graph. The resulting order parameter (a synchronisation measure from statistical physics) tracks simulated network consensus with a correlation of ρ = 0.997 and represents it as a phase transition. Consensus disruptions then appear as phase-coherence disturbances, providing candidate anomaly signals for node isolation, network partitions, and block withholding (three typical attacks on blockchains). On real blockchain data, where continuous phase dynamics are not observable, we construct a static phase proxy from per-pool block-attribution statistics; applied to Bitcoin, this proxy-based detector identifies the 2013 chain fork at 5.1σ significance on unmodified data. Validation on a second protocol family confirms that the phenomenology generalises. This framework expands physicists’ reach into adversarial systems, provides epidemic modellers with an empirical testbed, and offers blockchain operators a complementary, consensus-layer anomaly signal.
Date Acceptance
2026-07-03
Citation
Scientific Reports
ISSN
2045-2322
Publisher
Nature Portfolio
Journal / Book Title
Scientific Reports
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2026. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
License URL
Publication Status
Published online
Date Publish Online
2026-07-14