Scalable Byzantine Consensus for Everyone

Consensus, state-machine replication (SMR) and total order broadcast
(TOB) protocols lie at the core of most blockchain systems and many
other distributed applications. However, they are notorious for their
poor scalability. Despite the recent race in reducing overall message
complexity of leader-driven SMR/TOB protocols, scalability remains
poor and the throughput is typically inversely proportional to the
number of nodes.

In this session we will hear from Matej Pavlovic regarding MirBFT and its successor, ISS, turn leader-driven protocols into scalable multi-leader ones. The design is general enough to accommodate most leader-driven ordering protocols (BFT or CFT) and make them scale. The research prototype implementation, when applied to 3 different protocols (PBFT, HotStuff, and Raft) at the scale of 128 nodes, shows significant performance improvements (37x, 56x, and 55x, respectively).

Now is the time to build a public, open-source, highly modular,
production-ready implementation of MirBFT/ISS for use in real-world
systems.

Presenter Bio:

Matej Pavlovic is a distributed systems researcher specializing in
Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols. He obtained a
Master's degree in computer engineering at the Vienna University of
Technology in 2013 and a PhD in distributed systems in 2019,
supervised by Prof. Rachid Guerraoui. After having worked on
permissioned blockchain solutions at IBM Research Europe - Zurich, he
is joining Protocol Labs to work in the domain of public blockchain
systems.

Recently he has worked on showing that consensus is not necessary to
implement a cryptocurrency (The Consensus Number of a Cryptocurrency, PODC'19) and on scaling classic BFT protocols (MirBFT, pending publication). Currently he is starting the effort to implement a
highly modular production-grade open-source implementation of MirBFT
and related protocols.

GitHub Link:

https://github.com/hyperledger-labs/mirbft