Red Belly: A Secure, Fair and Scalable Open Blockchain

Prof. Vincent Gramoli University of Sydney Wednesday, May 12, 2021 @ 10:15 am Virtual Hosted by: Prof. Rachid Guerraoui

Abstract

As blockchain has found applications to track ownership of digital assets, it is crucial for companies to adopt more secure blockchains than the ones proven vulnerable to network attacks before moving them in production. In this paper, we present Red Belly Blockchain (RBBC), the first secure blockchain whose throughput scales to hundreds of geo-distributed consensus participants. To this end, we drastically revisited Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) blockchains through three contributions: (i) defining the Set Byzantine Consensus problem of agreeing on an enumerable valid subset of the union of the proposed values; (ii) adopting a fair leaderless design to offer censorship-resistance guaranteeing the commit of correctly requested transactions; (iii) introducing sharded verification to limit the number of signature verifications of each transaction. We evaluate RBBC on up to 1000 VMs of 3 different types, spread across 4 continents, and under attacks. Although its performance is affected by attacks, RBBC scales in that its throughput increases to hundreds of consensus nodes and achieves 30K TPS throughput and 3 second latency on 1000 VMs, hence improving by 3x both the latency and the throughput of its closest competitor.

Bio

Vincent Gramoli is the head of the Concurrent Systems Research Group at the University of Sydney and a Visiting Professor at EPFL. Prior to this, he was affiliated with INRIA, Cornell University, Université de Neuchâtel and CSIRO. Vincent received his PhD from University of Rennes and his Habilitation from Sorbonne University. He is a Fellow of the Australian Research Council.