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Morpheus Consensus: Excelling on Trails and Autobahns

Authors Andrew Lewis-Pye , Ehud Shapiro

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Computer systems organization → Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks
Keywords
  • Distributed computing
  • consensus
  • quiescence

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Abstract

Recent research in consensus has often focussed on protocols for State-Machine-Replication (SMR) that can handle high throughputs. Such state-of-the-art protocols (generally DAG-based) induce undue overhead when the needed throughput is low, or else exhibit unnecessarily-poor latency and communication complexity during periods of low throughput.
Here we present Morpheus Consensus, which naturally morphs from a quiescent low-throughput leaderless blockchain protocol to a high-throughput leader-based DAG protocol and back, excelling in latency and complexity in both settings. During high-throughout, Morpheus pars with state-of-the-art DAG-based protocols, including Autobahn [Giridharan et al., 2024]. During low-throughput, Morpheus exhibits competitive complexity and lower latency than standard protocols such as PBFT [Castro et al., 1999] and Tendermint [Buchman, 2016; Buchman et al., 2018], which in turn do not perform well during high-throughput. 
The key idea of Morpheus is that as long as blocks do not conflict (due to Byzantine behaviour, network delays, or high-throughput simultaneous production) it produces a forkless blockchain, promptly finalizing each block upon arrival. It assigns a leader only if one is needed to resolve conflicts, in a manner and with performance not unlike Autobahn.

Cite As Get BibTex

Andrew Lewis-Pye and Ehud Shapiro. Morpheus Consensus: Excelling on Trails and Autobahns. In 29th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 361, pp. 35:1-35:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2025.35

Author Details

Andrew Lewis-Pye
  • London School of Economics, UK
Ehud Shapiro
  • Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

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