ResilientDB: Global Scale Resilient Blockchain Fabric

TL;DR

ResilientDB introduces GeoBFT, a scalable Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocol optimized for geo-distributed blockchain systems, achieving significant performance improvements over existing protocols.

Contribution

The paper presents GeoBFT, a novel geo-scale Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocol that enhances scalability and performance in geographically distributed blockchain networks.

Findings

GeoBFT outperforms state-of-the-art protocols by a factor of six in geo-scale deployments.

GeoBFT achieves excellent scalability through topological-aware grouping and local consensus parallelization.

Implementation in ResilientDB demonstrates high performance and robustness in real-world scenarios.

Abstract

Recent developments in blockchain technology have inspired innovative new designs in resilient distributed and database systems. At their core, these blockchain applications typically use Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols to maintain a common state across all replicas, even if some replicas are faulty or malicious. Unfortunately, existing consensus protocols are not designed to deal with geo-scale deployments in which many replicas spread across a geographically large area participate in consensus. To address this, we present the Geo-Scale Byzantine FaultTolerant consensus protocol (GeoBFT). GeoBFT is designed for excellent scalability by using a topological-aware grouping of replicas in local clusters, by introducing parallelization of consensus at the local level, and by minimizing communication between clusters. To validate our vision of high-performance geo-scale resilient distributed systems, we implement GeoBFT in our efficient ResilientDB permissioned blockchain fabric. We show that GeoBFT is not only sound and provides great scalability, but also outperforms state-of-the-art consensus protocols by a factor of six in geo-scale deployments.