Concordia: A Streamlined Consensus Protocol for Blockchain Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocol for sharded blockchain networks that does not rely on expensive leader-driven communication. The proposed protocol selects a single block proposer at a time and uses threshold signatures as a voting mechanism to confirm the validity of the proposed block. By using a gossip-like communication scheme, each node can collect and recover the group signature within O(logN) steps. With only one block proposer per consensus round, there is no possibility of conflicting blocks and resultant forks. Therefore, our consensus protocol requires only one round of one-way communication to achieve finality for each block. Our protocol guarantees safety and liveness while tolerating up to f faulty participants among 2f + 1 nodes. Our performance study shows that the proposed protocol enables hundreds of nodes to participate in the agreement process, and can finalize large blocks in approximately 10 seconds.