Dandelion: multiplexing Byzantine agreements to unlock blockchain performance

TL;DR

This paper enhances the Algorand blockchain protocol by multiplexing Byzantine agreements, significantly increasing throughput while maintaining low latency and strong security, suitable for decentralized applications.

Contribution

It introduces a multiplexing approach to Byzantine agreements in Algorand, achieving four times higher throughput without compromising security or latency.

Findings

Fourfold increase in throughput in wide area network experiments

Maintains low latency and strong security features

Scales efficiently to ten thousand nodes

Abstract

Permissionless blockchain protocols are known to consume an outrageous amount of computing power and suffer from a trade-off between latency and confidence in transaction confirmation. The recently proposed Algorand blockchain protocol employs Byzantine agreements and has shown transaction confirmation latency on the order of seconds. Its strong resilience to Denial-of-Service and Sybil attacks and its low computing power footprint make it a strong candidate for the venue of decentralized economies and business ecosystems across industries. Nevertheless, Algorand's throughput is still far from the requirements of such applications. In this paper, we empower Algorand's protocol by multiplexing its byzantine agreements in order to improve performance. Experiments on wide area networks with up to ten thousand nodes show a 4-fold throughput increase compared to the original Algorand protocol.