What is the Context of Byzantine Fault Tolerance?

Debates concerning Byzantine Fault Tolerance often arise when discussing the security models of various blockchain protocols, particularly in relation to their resistance against Sybil attacks or coordinated malicious actions by network participants. Its implementation and robustness are critical considerations for assessing the trustworthiness of a given distributed ledger technology.

Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Definition

Byzantine Fault Tolerance is a property of a distributed system that allows it to continue operating correctly even when some of its components fail or act maliciously. In blockchain contexts, it ensures that the network can reach agreement on the state of the ledger despite the presence of nodes that may exhibit unpredictable or adversarial behavior. This capability is fundamental to the security and reliability of decentralized ledgers.

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∞Asynchronous Network

∞Directed Acyclic Graph

∞Locally Defined Trust

Asymmetric DAG Consensus Unlocks Constant Finality with Local Trust Assumptions

By extending DAG-Rider to use asymmetric quorums, this work achieves constant-time BFT finality under realistic, locally defined trust models.

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∞Fault Tolerant Systems

∞State Machine Replication

∞Distributed Consensus

Formal Rewrites Safely Scale Byzantine Fault Tolerance Protocols Fivefold

A new formal model and rewrite methodology prove that decoupling and partitioning can safely achieve a fivefold throughput increase for BFT protocols.

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∞Network Resilience

∞Leaderless Agreement

∞Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Asynchronous BFT Achieves Practical Performance through Designated Leaders

Alea-BFT combines designated leader efficiency with asynchronous resilience, creating a simple, highly performant BFT protocol that eliminates network timing assumptions.

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∞Dishonest Majority

∞Network Security

∞Foundational Cryptography

Communication Lower Bounds Redefine Broadcast Efficiency in Dishonest-Majority Systems

New theoretical bounds and a sub-quadratic protocol fundamentally redefine the communication cost for Byzantine broadcast in dishonest-majority networks.

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∞Asynchronous Consensus

∞High Throughput

∞Block Sorting Mechanism

Graded Broadcast Unlocks Optimal Latency for Asynchronous BFT Consensus

Falcon BFT introduces Graded Broadcast, bypassing the agreement stage to resolve high latency and instability in asynchronous consensus protocols.

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∞Liveness Safety

∞State Machine Replication

∞Distributed Systems

Coding Techniques Achieve Near-Optimal Synchronous BFT Communication Complexity

The Hamster protocol uses coding techniques to reduce Byzantine Fault Tolerance communication to near-optimal O(mn), unlocking linear throughput scaling.

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∞Quorum Intersection

∞Distributed Computing Theory

∞Fault Tolerance

Asymmetric Trust DAG Consensus Achieves Constant-Time Finality

The new common core primitive enables asynchronous DAG consensus to achieve constant-time finality under heterogeneous, asymmetric trust assumptions.

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∞Unbounded Message Delays

∞Consensus Resilience

∞Random Scheduler

Random Asynchronous Model Circumvents BFT Impossibility for Practical Distributed Systems

The Random Asynchronous Model replaces adversarial scheduling with a random one, unlocking deterministic BFT consensus protocols previously deemed impossible.

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∞Asynchronous Consensus

∞Consensus Commit Rule

∞Optimal Consensus Latency

Mysticeti Achieves Optimal Byzantine Consensus Latency by Uncertified DAGs

This new DAG-based Byzantine consensus protocol reaches the theoretical 3-round latency limit by eliminating explicit block certification, drastically accelerating finality for high-throughput chains.