PSYROBJRN-CAD617
Issues in DAG Networks
DAG networks were built to escape the throughput ceiling of single-chain blockchains by keeping concurrent blocks instead of discarding them. This synthesis of peer-reviewed research from 2015–2025 finds that DAGs do not remove the scalability–security trade-off; they relocate it. Unstructured DAGs like IOTA’s Tangle stay vulnerable to parasite and splitting attacks unless coordinators or stake weights are added. Structured blockDAGs recover ordering but face sorting costs, incentive deviations and partition attacks. DAG-BFT protocols offer strong finality under conventional validator assumptions. Privacy, light clients, incentives and shared benchmarks remain open. Future designs must prove confirmation bounds, partition rules and incentive compatibility.