Current blockchain consensus protocols -- notably, Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) -- deliver global agreement but exhibit structural constraints. PoW anchors security in heavy computation, inflating energy use and imposing high confirmation latency. PoS improves efficiency but introduces stake concentration, long-range and "nothing-at-stake" vulnerabilities, and a hard performance ceiling shaped by slot times and multi-round committee voting. In this paper, we propose Proof of Trusted Execution (PoTE), a consensus paradigm where agreement emerges from verifiable execution rather than replicated re-execution. Validators operate inside heterogeneous VM-based TEEs, each running the same canonical program whose measurement is publicly recorded, and each producing vendor-backed attestations that bind the enclave code hash to the block contents. Because the execution is deterministic and the proposer is uniquely derived from public randomness, PoTE avoids forks, eliminates slot.time bottlenecks, and commits blocks in a single round of verification. We present the design of a PoTE consensus client, describe our reference implementation, and evaluate its performance against the stringent throughput requirements of the Trillion decentralized exchange.

翻译：当前区块链共识协议——尤其是工作量证明（PoW）和权益证明（PoS）——虽能实现全局一致性，但存在结构性限制。PoW将安全性锚定于高强度计算，导致能源消耗激增并带来高确认延迟。PoS提升了效率，但引入了权益集中化、长程攻击与“无利害关系”漏洞，且受限于时隙时间和多轮委员会投票形成的性能硬性上限。本文提出可信执行证明（PoTE），这是一种通过可验证执行而非重复执行实现共识的范式。验证者在基于异构虚拟机的可信执行环境（TEE）中运行，每个TEE执行相同的规范程序（其度量值公开记录），并生成供应商背书的证明，将飞地代码哈希与区块内容绑定。由于执行具有确定性且提案者由公开随机性唯一派生，PoTE避免了分叉，消除了时隙时间瓶颈，并能在单轮验证中完成区块提交。我们展示了PoTE共识客户端的设计，描述了参考实现，并针对Trillion去中心化交易所的严苛吞吐量要求评估了其性能。