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Brief Announcement: Fast Tendermint: Speeding up a Foundational Consensus Protocol

Authors Preston Vander Vos , Daniel Cason

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LIPIcs.DISC.2026.55.pdf
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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Distributed algorithms
Keywords
  • BFT consensus
  • Tendermint
  • partial synchrony
  • good-case latency

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Abstract

Tendermint is among the most widely studied and deployed Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols, owing in part to its native leader-rotation mechanism that subsumes complex view changes. Like most partially-synchronous BFT protocols, Tendermint tolerates f < n/3 Byzantine processes and decides in three communication steps. Motivated by the push for lower-latency blockchains, a recent line of work shows that consensus can be solved in two communication steps when f < n/5. We present Fast Tendermint, an adaptation of Tendermint to the n > 5f setting that decides in two communication steps in the good case, while preserving Tendermint’s leader-rotation structure. Fast Tendermint collapses Tendermint’s prevote and precommit steps into a single voting step and merges the locked and valid state. We give proofs of agreement, validity, and termination, and a formal specification in Quint, a modern surface syntax for TLA^+, used to model-check the protocol.

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Preston Vander Vos and Daniel Cason. Brief Announcement: Fast Tendermint: Speeding up a Foundational Consensus Protocol. In 40th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 397, pp. 55:1-55:7, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2026.55

Author Details

Preston Vander Vos
  • Circle Research, San Francisco, USA
Daniel Cason
  • Circle Research, Lugano, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

We thank Josef Widder and Manuel Bravo for early discussions on the protocol and assistance with Quint modeling; Hernán Vanzetto for writing the TLA+ model and proofs; and Alex Ranchal-Pedrosa for surfacing an important problem in an earlier version of the pseudo-code.

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References

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