International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We propose a novel timestamping mechanism for consensus protocols that reliably assigns submission times to honest transactions while preventing adversarial transactions from forging their timestamps. Our mechanism remains secure even under asynchronous networks and in the presence of corrupted parties. We demonstrate how it can be integrated into the three main families of consensus protocols and show its compatibility with layer-2 solutions. This construction enables robust layer-2 implementations that do not rely on timing assumptions, remain resilient under network saturation, and prevent collusion between users and validators to censor honest users.