# 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.

## Key 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.

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/1812.11747