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Optimality and Trade-Offs in Fast BFT SMR

Authors Neil Giridharan , Minh Tung Nguyen , Ittai Abraham , Allen Clement, Natacha Crooks , Pierre Sutra

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Distributed algorithms
Keywords
  • Fast state machine replication
  • consensus
  • partial synchrony
  • fault-tolerance

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Abstract

Leader-based state-machine replication (SMR) protocols are the most popular and widely deployed protocols in practice. However, they suffer from high latency because all commands need to be routed through and ordered by the leader. Fast SMR protocols overcome this limitation by executing non-conflicting commands with minimal latency of two message delays (measured from the time the client sends its request). These protocols in the crash-fault setting have attracted significant interest in both academia and industry. This interest is driven by practical advantages over leader-based protocols, including lower latency for non-conflicting commands, higher throughput, greater availability, and increased fairness. While Fast SMR is well studied in the crash-fault setting, the Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) setting remains much less studied, with only a small number of existing Fast BFT SMR protocols. In this paper, we present tight upper and lower bounds on the replication factor required for Fast BFT SMR. We also present a suboptimal protocol that illustrates a trade-off between replication factor and recovery efficiency.

Cite As Get BibTex

Neil Giridharan, Minh Tung Nguyen, Ittai Abraham, Allen Clement, Natacha Crooks, and Pierre Sutra. Optimality and Trade-Offs in Fast BFT SMR. In 40th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 397, pp. 6:1-6:21, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2026.6

Author Details

Neil Giridharan
  • University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Minh Tung Nguyen
  • Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, France
Ittai Abraham
  • a16z Crypto Research, New York City, NY, USA
Allen Clement
  • Subzero Labs, Zurich, Switzerland
Natacha Crooks
  • University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Pierre Sutra
  • Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, France

Funding

This work was partially supported by the EU CHIST-ERA network, NSF CAREER 2442542, a Sui Research Award, and gifts from Accenture, Algorithmic SuperIntelligence Labs, Amazon, AMD, Anyscale, Broadcom, cmpnd, Google, IBM, Intel, Intesa Sanpaolo, Lambda, Lightspeed, Mirendil, NVIDIA, Samsung SDS, and VESSL. Part of this work was done while Neil Giridharan and Natacha Crooks were employees at Subzero Labs.

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