Snowflake to Avalanche : A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Cryptocurrencies Team Rocket

This paper introduces a new family of leaderless Byzantine fault tolerance protocols, built on a metastable mechanism. These protocols provide a strong probabilistic safety guarantee in the presence of Byzantine adversaries, while their concurrent nature enables them to achieve high throughput and scalability. Unlike blockchains that rely on proof-of-work, they are quiescent and green. Surprisingly, unlike traditional consensus protocolswhich require O(n) communication, their communication complexity ranges from O(kn log n) to O(kn) for some security parameter k n. The paper describes the protocol family, instantiates it in three separate protocols, analyzes their guarantees, and describes how they can be used to construct the core of an internet-scale electronic payment system. The system is evaluated in a large scale deployment. Experiments demonstrate that the system can achieve high throughput (1300 tps), provide low confirmation latency (4 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.