The latest gossip on BFT consensus
Ethan Buchman, Jae Kwon, Zarko Milosevic
TL;DR
The paper addresses obtaining Byzantine fault-tolerant agreement across large, partially connected networks typical of blockchain systems. It presents Tendermint, a PBFT/DLS-inspired BFT SMR protocol that uses round-based leadership and gossip-based communication to achieve consistent event ordering, even in adversarial settings. A key contribution is a new termination mechanism that ensures eventual progress after Global Stabilization Time, overcoming limitations of earlier BFT termination schemes. The Tendermint platform also provides a high-performance Go implementation, an interface for deterministic applications above the consensus, and deployment tools to simplify real-world usage.
Abstract
The paper presents Tendermint, a new protocol for ordering events in a distributed network under adversarial conditions. More commonly known as Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus or atomic broadcast, the problem has attracted significant attention in recent years due to the widespread success of blockchain-based digital currencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, which successfully solved the problem in a public setting without a central authority. Tendermint modernizes classic academic work on the subject and simplifies the design of the BFT algorithm by relying on a peer-to-peer gossip protocol among nodes.