Cuttlefish addresses several limitations of existing consensus-less and consensus-minimized decentralized ledgers, including restricted programmability and the risk of deadlocked assets. The key insight of Cuttlefish is that consensus in blockchains is necessary due to contention, rather than multiple owners of an asset as suggested by prior work. Previous proposals proactively use consensus to prevent contention from blocking assets, taking a pessimistic approach. In contrast, Cuttlefish introduces collective objects and multi-owner transactions that can offer most of the functionality of classic blockchains when objects transacted on are not under contention. Additionally, in case of contention, Cuttlefish proposes a novel `Unlock' protocol that significantly reduces the latency of unblocking contented objects. By leveraging these features, Cuttlefish implements consensus-less protocols for a broader range of transactions, including asset swaps and multi-signature transactions, which were previously believed to require consensus.

翻译：Cuttlefish解决了现有无共识及最小化共识去中心化账本的若干局限，包括受限的可编程性与资产死锁风险。其核心洞见在于：区块链中共识的必要性源于资源竞争，而非如先前工作所暗示的多资产所有者因素。先前方案采取悲观策略，通过主动使用共识来预防竞争导致的资产阻塞。相比之下，Cuttlefish引入集体对象与多所有者交易——当所交易对象未处于竞争状态时，可提供经典区块链的绝大部分功能。此外，针对竞争场景，Cuttlefish提出新型“Unlock”协议，显著降低阻塞对象的解锁延迟。凭借这些特性，Cuttlefish为更广泛的交易类型（包括资产交换与多重签名交易）实现了无共识协议，而这些交易此前被认为必须依赖共识。