arXiv subjects

Preston Vander Vos

Publications and source records attributed to Preston Vander Vos.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Fast Tendermint: Speeding Up a Foundational Consensus Protocol

Tendermint is among the most widely studied and deployed Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols, owing in part to its native leader-rotation mechanism that subsumes complex view changes. Like most partially-synchronous BFT protocols, Tendermint tolerates $f < n/3$ Byzantine processes and decides in three communication steps. Motivated by the push for lower-latency blockchains, a recent line of work shows that consensus can be solved in two communication steps when $f < n/5$. We present Fast Tendermint, an adaptation of Tendermint to the $n > 5f$ setting that decides in two communication steps in the good case, while preserving Tendermint's leader-rotation structure. Fast Tendermint collapses Tendermint's prevote and precommit steps into a single voting step and merges the $locked$ and $valid$ state. We give proofs of agreement, validity, and termination, and a formal specification in Quint, a modern surface syntax for TLA+, used to model-check the protocol.

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arXiv2026

BlueBottle: Fast and Robust Blockchains through Subsystem Specialization

Blockchain consensus faces a trilemma of security, latency, and decentralization. High-throughput systems often require a reduction in decentralization or robustness against strong adversaries, while highly decentralized and secure systems tend to have lower performance. We present BlueBottle, a two-layer consensus architecture. The core layer, BB-Core, is an n=5f+1 protocol that trades some fault tolerance for a much lower finality latency with a medium-sized core validator set. Our experiments show that BB-Core reduces latency by 20-25% in comparison to Mysticeti. The guard layer, BB-Guard, provides decentralized timestamping, proactive misbehavior detection in BB-Core, and a synchronous recovery path. When it observes equivocations or liveness failures in the core -- while tolerating up to f<3n/5 faulty nodes in the primary layer -- guard validators disseminate evidence, agree on misbehaving parties for exclusion or slashing, and either restart the core protocol (for liveness violations) or select a canonical fork (for safety violations). Together, these layers enable optimistic sub-second finality at high throughput while maintaining strong safety and liveness under a mild synchrony assumption.

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arXiv2026

AMP: Arc Multi-Proposer Protocol with Bounded Inclusion Guarantees

Blockchain systems that settle financial transactions face a structural tension: the single validator that assembles each block holds unilateral power over transaction inclusion and ordering. Traditional markets curb this very power through front-running and market-manipulation laws. Regulators have flagged the absence of such rules as a first-order concern for blockchain-based financial infrastructure. In response, we introduce AMP, a multi-proposer protocol, on top of the Tendermint consensus algorithm, where no validator can control the flow of transactions into blocks. Instead, dedicated nodes called proposers sit between users and validators. They collect user transactions, group them into payloads, and broadcast the payloads to all validators. Consequently, there is no mempool, and AMP applies the design principle of separating dissemination from agreement, which can lead to higher throughput. Validators publicly attest to receiving payloads and run consensus to decide the set of payloads to include in the next block. When all correct validators attest to a given payload, AMP guarantees that payload will be included in the next block; a block thus contains payloads from multiple proposers, allowing for bulk finalization. This bounded inclusion guarantee along with a deterministic ordering algorithm which is run over all payloads included in a block, curbs the power of any single validator. Validators no longer control what is included in a block, nor can they arbitrarily order the contents of blocks.

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arXiv2026

Concave is the New Linear: The Impossibility of Anti-Plutocratic DAO Governance

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) run protocol governance by letting token holders vote on proposals. The dominant rule, voting power proportional to wallet balance, concentrates control among a small number of large holders, fueling the token-control governance attacks that have already compromised real protocols. To counter this concentration, the community has turned to anti-plutocratic voting mechanisms such as Quadratic Voting (QV), which assign sublinear voting power per token with the goal of dampening the influence of large holders. We prove that no voting rule that derives power solely from wallet balance can succeed on a permissionless blockchain. Through a costed model of on-chain voting that captures realistic blockchain frictions -- including per-wallet splitting and voting costs, fixed setup costs, and minimum-balance requirements -- we show that whenever a wallet of any size yields nonzero voting power, a Sybil attacker who splits tokens across many wallets achieves total voting power that grows at least linearly in their token holdings. For concave rules actually proposed to dampen governance power -- those that are positive, increasing, and finite -- we show that the optimal strategy yields power that is asymptotically linear in token holdings, regardless of the cost scheme. Instantiating the model on real DAOs reveals attack costs orders of magnitude below the value at stake. Replaying the ten most recent finalized proposals of five major DAOs (ENS, Compound, Uniswap, Arbitrum, and ZKsync) under linear, quadratic, logarithmic, and power-($β= 0.25$) voting, we measure Sybil amplification factors between $1,172\times$ and $4,039\times$ under Quadratic Voting, and exceeding $229,000\times$ under steeper power rules.

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arXiv2025

Odontoceti: Ultra-Fast DAG Consensus with Two Round Commitment

Users of blockchains value scalability, expecting fast confirmations and immediate transaction processing. Odontoceti, the latest in DAG-based consensus, addresses these concerns by prioritizing low latency and high throughput, making a strategic trade-off in security by operating with a 20% fault tolerance instead of the established 33% level. It is the first DAG-based protocol to achieve commitment in just two communication rounds, delivering median latency of 300 milliseconds while processing 10,000 transactions per second under realistic network conditions. Odontoceti operates with n = 5f + 1 validators and creates an uncertified DAG with a novel decision rule for committing blocks. The protocol includes an optimization that advances progress when participants are slow, benefiting crash fault scenarios which are more common in practice than Byzantine faults. Evaluation results demonstrate 20-25% latency improvements compared to an existing production protocol, validating that reducing wave length from three rounds to two rounds yields meaningful performance benefits. This paper establishes the practical viability of lower fault tolerance consensus protocols for blockchains.

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