Scalable and Probabilistic Leaderless BFT Consensus through Metastability

Understand

This paper introduces a family of leaderless Byzantine fault tolerance protocols, built around a metastable mechanism via network subsampling.

• These protocols provide a strong probabilistic safety guarantee in the presence of Byzantine adversaries while their concurrent and leaderless nature enables them to achieve high throughput and scalability.
• Unlike blockchains that rely on proof-of-work, they are quiescent and green.
• Unlike traditional consensus protocols where one or more nodes typically process linear bits in the number of total nodes per decision, no node processes more than logarithmic bits.