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DAG It Off: Latency Prefers No Common Coins

Authors Ignacio Amores-Sesar , Viktor Grøndal , Adam Holmgård , Mads Ottendal

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LIPIcs.DISC.2025.5.pdf
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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Security and privacy → Distributed systems security
Keywords
  • Atomic broadcast
  • DAG-based
  • Partial synchrony

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Abstract

We introduce Black Marlin, the first Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based Byzantine atomic broadcast protocol in a partially synchronous setting that successfully forgoes the reliable broadcast and common coin primitives. Black Marlin achieves the optimal latency of 3 rounds of communication (4.25 with Byzantine faults) while maintaining optimal communication and amortized communication complexities. We present a formal security analysis of the protocol, accompanied by empirical evidence that Black Marlin outperforms state-of-the-art DAG-based protocols in both throughput and latency.

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Ignacio Amores-Sesar, Viktor Grøndal, Adam Holmgård, and Mads Ottendal. DAG It Off: Latency Prefers No Common Coins. In 39th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 356, pp. 5:1-5:17, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2025.5

Author Details

Ignacio Amores-Sesar
  • Aarhus University, Denmark
Viktor Grøndal
  • Aarhus University, Denmark
Adam Holmgård
  • Aarhus University, Denmark
Mads Ottendal
  • Aarhus University, Denmark

Funding

This work has been mostly funded by the Cryptographic Foundations for Digital Society, CryptoDigi, DFF Research Project 2, Grant ID 10.46540/3103-00077B, and partially funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation(SNSF) under grant agreement Nr. 188443 (Advanced Consensus Protocols) and by a grant from Avalanche, Inc. to the University of Bern.

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