arXiv subjects

Patrick O'Grady

Publications and source records attributed to Patrick O'Grady.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Multimmit: Extending Blocks for Faster Finality

To meet the throughput demands of modern blockchain systems, protocols for State Machine Replication (SMR) increasingly have many processors disseminate blocks of transactions in parallel, with consensus then establishing a total ordering on the blocks of all producers. Such designs face a choice as to when a block may enter the ordering. Certified approaches wait for a quorum to attest a block's availability, which is robust but adds message delays to every transaction. Uncertified approaches let proposals reference blocks immediately, which is fast but degrades rapidly when referenced data must be fetched on the critical path. Raptr, the state of the art, takes a middle course, finalising the longest prefix of the leader's proposal that a quorum holds, so that no processor ever blocks or fetches. The remaining weakness is sensitivity to order: if the data behind a single early batch is withheld, the proposal finalises little or nothing, so individual faulty producers can still deny the system its optimistic path. We present Multimmit, a protocol for $n \ge 5f+1$ processors combining a consensus layer requiring one round of voting per view with multi-chain data dissemination. Votes are cast relative to the leader's proposal, reporting per chain how far the voter can support it, and may themselves attest fresh blocks beyond it. A transaction block disseminated at time $t$ is ordered by $t+3δ$ in expectation and $t+2δ$ at best, measured from the block's dissemination rather than the leader's proposal. Degradation under faults is graceful: a faulty producer delays only its own chain's blocks, costing other chains at most a one-view wait for placement. No leader can both finalise its leader block and exclude a fresh, well-circulated block of an honest chain. Consensus traffic is tens of kilobytes per view, independent of transaction volume.

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arXiv2026

The Carnot Bound: Limits and Possibilities for Bandwidth-Efficient Consensus

In leader-based State Machine Replication (SMR), the leader's outgoing bandwidth is a natural throughput bottleneck. Erasure coding can alleviate this by letting the leader send each processor one fragment of each block rather than a full copy. The data expansion rate, the ratio of total data sent to payload size, determines how close throughput can get to network bandwidth. We investigate the fundamental limits of bandwidth-efficient leader-based consensus. We prove that protocols with 2-round finality (one voting round) cannot achieve a data expansion rate below approximately~$2.5$, matching existing protocols. Protocols with 3-round finality (two voting rounds) can do significantly better: the second voting round provides a recovery mechanism, letting leaders attempt aggressive erasure codes and safely fall back to conservative ones when reconstruction fails, without compromising consistency. We present two 3-round protocols realising this. Carnot~1 solves Extractable SMR, in which any correct processor can efficiently reconstruct any finalised block from fragments held by correct processors, but processors need not hold full blocks locally; this suffices for settings such as data availability layers. Carnot~1 assumes $n \geq 4f+1$ (at most $f$ Byzantine) and requires no fragment dissemination beyond the initial messages. Carnot~2 solves full SMR, where every correct processor eventually receives every finalised transaction. It operates under optimal resilience $n \geq 3f+1$, at the cost of additional fragment dissemination when Byzantine processors interfere. Both protocols support stable leaders. Under favourable conditions, leaders can use expansion rates approaching $1$; under adversarial conditions, they revert to safe rates of approximately $1.33$ and $1.5$, respectively, both well below the $2.5$ lower bound for 2-round finality.

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arXiv2026

Minimmit: Fast Finality with Even Faster Blocks

Achieving low-latency consensus in geographically distributed systems remains a key challenge for blockchain and distributed database applications. To this end, there has been significant recent interest in State-Machine-Replication (SMR) protocols that achieve 2-round finality under the assumption that $5f+1\leq n$, where $n$ is the number of processors and $f$ bounds the number of processors that may exhibit Byzantine faults. In these protocols, instructions are organised into views, each led by a different designated leader, and 2-round finality means that a leader's proposal can be finalised after just a single round of voting, meaning two rounds overall (one round for the proposal and one for voting). We introduce Minimmit, a Byzantine-fault-tolerant SMR protocol with lower latency than previous 2-round finality approaches. Our key insight is that view progression and transaction finality can operate on different quorum thresholds without compromising safety or liveness. Experiments simulating a globally distributed network of 50 processors, uniformly assigned across ten virtual regions, show that the approach leads to a 23.1% reduction in view latency and a 10.7% reduction in transaction latency compared to the state-of-the-art.

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arXiv2024

Frosty: Bringing strong liveness guarantees to the Snow family of consensus protocols

Snowman is the consensus protocol implemented by the Avalanche blockchain and is part of the Snow family of protocols, first introduced through the original Avalanche leaderless consensus protocol. A major advantage of Snowman is that each consensus decision only requires an expected constant communication overhead per processor in the `common' case that the protocol is not under substantial Byzantine attack, i.e. it provides a solution to the scalability problem which ensures that the expected communication overhead per processor is independent of the total number of processors $n$ during normal operation. This is the key property that would enable a consensus protocol to scale to 10,000 or more independent validators (i.e. processors). On the other hand, the two following concerns have remained: (1) Providing formal proofs of consistency for Snowman has presented a formidable challenge. (2) Liveness attacks exist in the case that a Byzantine adversary controls more than $O(\sqrt{n})$ processors, slowing termination to more than a logarithmic number of steps. In this paper, we address the two issues above. We consider a Byzantine adversary that controls at most $f<n/5$ processors. First, we provide a simple proof of consistency for Snowman. Then we supplement Snowman with a `liveness module' that can be triggered in the case that a substantial adversary launches a liveness attack, and which guarantees liveness in this event by temporarily forgoing the communication complexity advantages of Snowman, but without sacrificing these low communication complexity advantages during normal operation.

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