SBFT: a Scalable and Decentralized Trust Infrastructure

TL;DR

SBFT is a scalable, decentralized Byzantine fault tolerant blockchain system optimized for geo-replication, achieving near 2x throughput and 1.5x latency improvements over PBFT through innovative algorithmic techniques.

Contribution

SBFT introduces a novel combination of techniques to enhance scalability and performance in large-scale, geo-replicated Byzantine fault tolerant systems.

Findings

Handles over 200 replicas with 64 Byzantine failures

Achieves nearly 2x throughput compared to PBFT

Reduces latency by about 1.5x

Abstract

SBFT is a state of the art Byzantine fault tolerant permissioned blockchain system that addresses the challenges of scalability, decentralization and world-scale geo-replication. SBFTis optimized for decentralization and can easily handle more than 200 active replicas in a real world-scale deployment. We evaluate \sysname in a world-scale geo-replicated deployment with 209 replicas withstanding f=64 Byzantine failures. We provide experiments that show how the different algorithmic ingredients of \sysname increase its performance and scalability. The results show that SBFT simultaneously provides almost 2x better throughput and about 1.5x better latency relative to a highly optimized system that implements the PBFT protocol. To achieve this performance improvement, SBFT uses a combination of four ingredients: using collectors and threshold signatures to reduce communication to linear, using an optimistic fast path, reducing client communication and utilizing redundant servers for the fast path.