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Brief Announcement

DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2026.55

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

Authors: Preston Vander Vos and Daniel Cason

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 397, 40th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2026)

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)

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@InProceedings{vandervos_et_al:LIPIcs.DISC.2026.55,
  author =	{Vander Vos, Preston and Cason, Daniel},
  title =	{{Brief Announcement: Fast Tendermint: Speeding up a Foundational Consensus Protocol}},
  booktitle =	{40th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2026)},
  pages =	{55:1--55:7},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-454-3},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{397},
  editor =	{Moses Jr., William K. and Censor-Hillel, Keren},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2026.55},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-281611},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2026.55},
  annote =	{Keywords: BFT consensus, Tendermint, partial synchrony, good-case latency}
}

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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2024.20

How Robust Are Synchronous Consensus Protocols?

Authors: Nenad Milošević, Daniel Cason, Zarko Milošević, and Fernando Pedone

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 324, 28th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2024)

Abstract

Synchronous Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols have long been a reality in an academic setting, yet their practicality remains debated. The main concern of skeptics of synchronous systems is that the correctness of these protocols depends on the timely delivery of all messages within a predefined synchronous bound, Δ. This dependency creates a challenging tradeoff between protocol correctness and performance, as Δ directly impacts both. In this paper, we examine this tradeoff in detail. Specifically, we introduce BoundBFT, a new synchronous BFT consensus protocol. We analyze how BoundBFT’s correctness can be compromised and use this analysis to design and implement the most effective attack strategies that malicious processes could employ. Furthermore, we experimentally determine the synchronous bound Δ that provides sufficient confidence in maintaining protocol correctness even in the presence of malicious replicas. Finally, we apply this discovered bound to BoundBFT, evaluate its performance, and compare it to state-of-the-art synchronous and partially synchronous protocols.

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Nenad Milošević, Daniel Cason, Zarko Milošević, and Fernando Pedone. How Robust Are Synchronous Consensus Protocols?. In 28th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 324, pp. 20:1-20:25, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)

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@InProceedings{milosevic_et_al:LIPIcs.OPODIS.2024.20,
  author =	{Milo\v{s}evi\'{c}, Nenad and Cason, Daniel and Milo\v{s}evi\'{c}, Zarko and Pedone, Fernando},
  title =	{{How Robust Are Synchronous Consensus Protocols?}},
  booktitle =	{28th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2024)},
  pages =	{20:1--20:25},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-360-7},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{324},
  editor =	{Bonomi, Silvia and Galletta, Letterio and Rivi\`{e}re, Etienne and Schiavoni, Valerio},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2024.20},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-225560},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2024.20},
  annote =	{Keywords: Synchronous Consensus, Byzantine Failures, Blockchain}
}

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

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How Robust Are Synchronous Consensus Protocols?

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