A Weak Consensus Algorithm and Its Application to High-Performance Blockchain

TL;DR

This paper introduces a weak consensus algorithm that relaxes strict consistency requirements, enabling the creation of a high-performance blockchain system called Sphinx with significantly higher throughput than existing systems.

Contribution

The paper presents the first fully implemented blockchain system based on a novel weak consensus algorithm that improves performance by relaxing consistency constraints.

Findings

Sphinx achieves a peak throughput of 43,000 TPS.

The weak consensus algorithm maintains relative message position consistency.

Sphinx outperforms Ethereum in the same environment.

Abstract

A large number of consensus algorithms have been proposed. However, the requirement of strict consistency limits their wide adoption, especially in high-performance required systems. In this paper, we propose a weak consensus algorithm that only maintains the consistency of relative positions between the messages. We apply this consensus algorithm to construct a high-performance blockchain system, called \textit{Sphinx}. We implement the system with 32k+ lines of code including all components like consensus/P2P/ledger/etc. The evaluations show that Sphinx can reach a peak throughput of 43k TPS (with 8 full nodes), which is significantly faster than current blockchain systems such as Ethereum given the same experimental environment. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first weak consensus algorithm with a fully implemented blockchain system.