Zaptos: Towards Optimal Blockchain Latency

TL;DR

Zaptos introduces a parallel pipelined architecture that significantly reduces end-to-end blockchain latency and increases throughput, outperforming existing systems in geo-distributed environments.

Contribution

The paper presents Zaptos, a novel parallel pipelined architecture that minimizes blockchain latency while maintaining high throughput, addressing key sources of latency in blockchain systems.

Findings

25% latency reduction under low load

Over 40% latency reduction under high load

Achieves 20,000 TPS with sub-second latency

Abstract

End-to-end blockchain latency has become a critical topic of interest in both academia and industry. However, while modern blockchain systems process transactions through multiple stages, most research has primarily focused on optimizing the latency of the Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus component. In this work, we identify key sources of latency in blockchain systems and introduce Zaptos, a parallel pipelined architecture designed to minimize end-to-end latency while maintaining the high-throughput of pipelined blockchains. We implemented Zaptos and evaluated it against the pipelined architecture of the Aptos blockchain in a geo-distributed environment. Our evaluation demonstrates a 25\% latency reduction under low load and over 40\% reduction under high load. Notably, Zaptos achieves a throughput of 20,000 transactions per second with sub-second latency, surpassing previously reported blockchain throughput, with sub-second latency, by an order of magnitude.