arXiv subjects

Maofan Yin

Publications and source records attributed to Maofan Yin.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Lyte Quorum: Off-Chain Ready Smart Contract Hosted with Choice

This paper introduces Lyquor, a decentralized platform that reimagines blockchain infrastructure through a service-centric model where nodes selectively host smart contracts (called Lyquids) while preserving global composability. We present three key innovations: (1) Fate-Constrained Ordering (FCO), which decouples consensus from execution to enable selective hosting without sacrificing Layer-1 grade composability; (2) Direct Memory Architecture (DMA), which eliminates state access bottlenecks by providing each contract with persistent, byte-addressable virtual memory; and (3) Universal Procedure Call (UPC), which enables fault-tolerant, programmable coordination across distributed off-chain computation. Together, these components are powered by a Rust-macroed unified programming model where on-chain and off-chain logic coexist seamlessly, supporting both traditional smart contract patterns and novel distributed applications. Lyquor addresses critical limitations in existing systems while maintaining compatibility with Ethereum APIs, offering a path toward truly scalable decentralized computation.

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arXiv2025

Ordered Consensus with Equal Opportunity

The specification of state machine replication (SMR) has no requirement on the final total order of commands. In blockchains based on SMR, however, order matters, since different orders could provide their clients with different financial rewards. Ordered consensus augments the specification of SMR to include specific guarantees on such order, with a focus on limiting the influence of Byzantine nodes. Real-world ordering manipulations, however, can and do happen even without Byzantine replicas, typically because of factors, such as faster networks or closer proximity to the blockchain infrastructure, that give some clients an unfair advantage. To address this challenge, this paper proceeds to extend ordered consensus by requiring it to also support equal opportunity, a concrete notion of fairness, widely adopted in social sciences. Informally, equal opportunity requires that two candidates who, according to a set of criteria deemed to be relevant, are equally qualified for a position (in our case, a specific slot in the SMR total order), should have an equal chance of landing it. We show how randomness can be leveraged to keep bias in check, and, to this end, introduce the secret random oracle (SRO), a system component that generates randomness in a fault-tolerant manner. We describe two SRO designs based, respectively, on trusted hardware and threshold verifiable random functions, and instantiate them in Bercow, a new ordered consensus protocol that, by approximating equal opportunity up to within a configurable factor, can effectively mitigate well-known ordering attacks in SMR-based blockchains.

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arXiv2024

BBCA-CHAIN: Low Latency, High Throughput BFT Consensus on a DAG

This paper presents a partially synchronous BFT consensus protocol powered by BBCA, a lightly modified Byzantine Consistent Broadcast (BCB) primitive. BBCA provides a Complete-Adopt semantic through an added probing interface to allow either aborting the broadcast by correct nodes or exclusively, adopting the message consistently in case of a potential delivery. It does not introduce any extra types of messages or additional communication costs to BCB. BBCA is harnessed into BBCA-CHAIN to make direct commits on a chained backbone of a causally ordered graph of blocks, without any additional voting blocks or artificial layering. With the help of Complete-Adopt, the additional knowledge gained from the underlying BCB completely removes the voting latency in popular DAG-based protocols. At the same time, causal ordering allows nodes to propose blocks in parallel and achieve high throughput. BBCA-CHAIN thus closes up the gap between protocols built by consistent broadcasts (e.g., Bullshark) to those without such an abstraction (e.g., PBFT/HotStuff), emphasizing their shared fundamental principles. Using a Bracha-style BCB as an example, we fully specify BBCA-CHAIN with simplicity, serving as a solid basis for high-performance replication systems (and blockchains).

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arXiv2024

On Orchestrating Parallel Broadcasts for Distributed Ledgers

This paper introduces and develops the concept of ``ticketing'', through which atomic broadcasts are orchestrated by nodes in a distributed system. The paper studies different ticketing regimes that allow parallelism, yet prevent slow nodes from hampering overall progress. It introduces a hybrid scheme which combines managed and unmanaged ticketing regimes, striking a balance between adaptivity and resilience. The performance evaluation demonstrates how managed and unmanaged ticketing regimes benefit throughput in systems with heterogeneous resources both in static and dynamic scenarios, with the managed ticketing regime performing better among the two as it adapts better. Finally, it demonstrates how using the hybrid ticketing regime performance can enjoy both the adaptivity of the managed regime and the liveness guarantees of the unmanaged regime.

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arXiv2023

BBCA-LEDGER: High Throughput Consensus meets Low Latency

This paper presents BBCA-LEDGER, a Byzantine log replication technology for partially synchronous networks enabling blocks to be broadcast in parallel, such that each broadcast is finalized independently and instantaneously into an individual slot in the log. Every finalized broadcast is eventually committed to the total ordering, so that all network bandwidth has utility in disseminating blocks. Finalizing log slots in parallel achieves both high throughput and low latency. BBCA-LEDGER is composed of two principal protocols that interweave together, a low-latency/high-throughput happy path, and a high-throughput DAG-based fallback path. The happy path employs a novel primitive called BBCA, a consistent broadcast enforcing unique slot numbering. In steady state, BBCA ensures that a transaction can be committed with low latency, in just 3 network steps. Under network partitions or faults, we harness recent advances in BFT and build a fallback mechanism on a direct acyclic graph (DAG) created by BBCA broadcasts. In this manner, BBCA-LEDGER exhibits the throughput benefits of DAG-based BFT in face of gaps.

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arXiv2023

Lessons from HotStuff

This article will take you on a journey to the core of blockchains, their Byzantine consensus engine, where HotStuff emerged as a new algorithmic foundation for the classical Byzantine generals consensus problem. The first part of the article underscores the theoretical advances HotStuff enabled, including several models in which HotStuff-based solutions closed problems which were opened for decades. The second part focuses on HotStuff performance in real life setting, where its simplicity drove adoption of HotStuff as the golden standard for blockchain design, and many variants and improvements built on top of it. Both parts of this document are meant to describe lessons drawn from HotStuff as well as dispel certain myths.

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arXiv2021

CedrusDB: Persistent Key-Value Store with Memory-Mapped Lazy-Trie

As a result of RAM becoming cheaper, there has been a trend in key-value store design towards maintaining a fast in-memory index (such as a hash table) while logging user operations to disk, allowing high performance under failure-free conditions while still being able to recover from failures. This design, however, comes at the cost of long recovery times or expensive checkpoint operations. This paper presents a new in-memory index that is also storage-friendly. A "lazy-trie" is a variant of the hash-trie data structure that achieves near-optimal height, has practical storage overhead, and can be maintained on-disk with standard write-ahead logging. We implemented CedrusDB, persistent key-value store based on a lazy-trie. The lazy-trie is kept on disk while made available in memory using standard memory-mapping. The lazy-trie organization in virtual memory allows CedrusDB to better leverage concurrent processing than other on-disk index schemes (LSMs, B+-trees). CedrusDB achieves comparable or superior performance to recent log-based in-memory key-value stores in mixed workloads while being able to recover quickly from failures.

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arXiv2020

Scalable and Probabilistic Leaderless BFT Consensus through Metastability

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. It does not require accurate knowledge of all participants and exposes new possible tradeoffs and improvements in safety and liveness for building consensus protocols. The paper describes the Snow protocol family, analyzes its guarantees, and describes how it can be used to construct the core of an internet-scale electronic payment system called Avalanche, which is evaluated in a large scale deployment. Experiments demonstrate that the system can achieve high throughput (3400 tps), provide low confirmation latency (1.35 sec), and scale well compared to existing systems that deliver similar functionality. For our implementation and setup, the bottleneck of the system is in transaction verification.

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arXiv2019

HotStuff: BFT Consensus in the Lens of Blockchain

We present HotStuff, a leader-based Byzantine fault-tolerant replication protocol for the partially synchronous model. Once network communication becomes synchronous, HotStuff enables a correct leader to drive the protocol to consensus at the pace of actual (vs. maximum) network delay--a property called responsiveness--and with communication complexity that is linear in the number of replicas. To our knowledge, HotStuff is the first partially synchronous BFT replication protocol exhibiting these combined properties. HotStuff is built around a novel framework that forms a bridge between classical BFT foundations and blockchains. It allows the expression of other known protocols (DLS, PBFT, Tendermint, Casper), and ours, in a common framework. Our deployment of HotStuff over a network with over 100 replicas achieves throughput and latency comparable to that of BFT-SMaRt, while enjoying linear communication footprint during leader failover (vs. quadratic with BFT-SMaRt).

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