Reducing Latency of DAG-based Consensus in the Asynchronous Setting via the UTXO Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a UTXO-based commit rule and a new consensus algorithm called "Board and Clerk" to significantly reduce transaction latency in DAG-based asynchronous consensus protocols, while also improving verification efficiency.

Contribution

It proposes a novel UTXO-based commit rule and the "Board and Clerk" consensus algorithm to halve transaction latency for many transactions in DAG-based systems.

Findings

Halves transaction latency for about 50% of transactions

More transactions benefit from latency reduction as fault tolerance increases

Proposes the Hyper-Block Model with flexible proposing strategies

Abstract

DAG-based consensus has attracted significant interest due to its high throughput in asynchronous network settings. However, existing protocols such as DAG-rider (Keidar et al., PODC 2021) and ``Narwhal and Tusk'' (Danezis et al., Eurosys 2022) face two undesired practical issues: (1) high transaction latency and (2) high cost to verify transaction outcomes. To address (1), this work introduces a novel commit rule based on the Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) Data Model, which allows a node to predict the transaction results before triggering the commitment. We propose a new consensus algorithm named ``Board and Clerk'', which reduces the transaction latency by half for roughly 50% of transactions. As the tolerance for faults escalates, more transactions can partake in this latency reduction. In addition, we also propose the Hyper-Block Model with two flexible proposing strategies to tackle (2): blocking and non-blocking. Using our proposed strategies, each node first predicts the transaction results if its proposal is committed and packs this result as a commitment in its proposal. The hyper-block packs the signature of the proposal and the outputs of the consensus layer together in order to prove the transaction results.