FireLedger: A High Throughput Blockchain Consensus Protocol

Abstract: Blockchains are distributed secure ledgers to which transactions are issued continuously and each block of transactions is tightly coupled to its predecessors. Permissioned blockchains place special emphasis on transactions throughput. In this paper we present FireLedger, which leverages the iterative nature of blockchains in order to improve their throughput in optimistic execution scenarios. FireLedger trades latency for throughput in the sense that in FireLedger the last f + 1 blocks of each node's blockchain are considered tentative, i.e., they may be rescinded in case one of the last f + 1 blocks proposers was Byzantine. Yet, when optimistic assumptions are met, a new block is decided in each communication step, which consists of a proposer that sends only its proposal and all other participants are sending a single bit each. Our performance study demonstrates that in a single Amazon data-center, FireLedger running on 10 mid-range Amazon nodes obtains a throughput of up to 160K transactions per second for (typical Bitcoin size) 512 bytes transactions. In a 10 nodes Amazon geo-distributed setting with 512 bytes transactions, FireLedger obtains a throughput of 30K tps. Moreover, on higher end Amazon machines, FireLedger obtains $20%-600%$ better throughput than state of the art protocols like HotStuff and BFT-SMaRt, depending on the exact configuration.