Evaluating the Red Belly Blockchain

TL;DR

This paper presents the Red Belly Blockchain, a scalable, secure blockchain system capable of handling over a hundred thousand transactions across multiple continents, with superior throughput and latency compared to traditional and randomized Byzantine fault tolerant solutions.

Contribution

The paper introduces the Red Belly Blockchain, a novel scalable BFT blockchain that outperforms existing solutions in throughput and latency in geo-distributed environments.

Findings

RBBC scales to hundreds of machines in geo-distributed settings.

RBBC guarantees transaction finality within 3 seconds.

RBBC outperforms traditional and randomized BFT solutions in throughput and latency.

Abstract

In this paper, we present the most extensive evaluation of blockchain system to date. To achieve scalability across servers in more than 10 countries located on 4 different continents, we drastically revisited Byzantine fault tolerant blockchains and verification of signatures. The resulting blockchain, called the Red Belly Blockchain (RBBC), commits more than a hundred thousand transactions issued by permissionless nodes. These transactions are grouped into blocks within few seconds through a partially synchronous consensus run by permissioned nodes. It prevents double spending by guaranteeing that a unique block is decided at any given index of the chain in a deterministic way by all participants. We compared the performance of RBBC against traditional Byzantine fault tolerant alternatives and more recent randomized solutions. In the same geo-distributed environment with low-end machines, we noticed two interesting comparisons: (i) the RBBC throughput scales to hundreds of machines whereas the classic 3-step leader-based BFT state machine used by consortium blockchains cannot scale to 40 identically configured nodes; (ii) RBBC guarantees transaction finality in 3 seconds and experiences a third of the latency that randomized-based solutions like HoneyBadgerBFT can offer. This empirical evaluation demonstrates that blockchain scalability can be achieved without sacrificing security.