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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2026.6

Optimality and Trade-Offs in Fast BFT SMR

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

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

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.

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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)

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@InProceedings{giridharan_et_al:LIPIcs.DISC.2026.6,
  author =	{Giridharan, Neil and Nguyen, Minh Tung and Abraham, Ittai and Clement, Allen and Crooks, Natacha and Sutra, Pierre},
  title =	{{Optimality and Trade-Offs in Fast BFT SMR}},
  booktitle =	{40th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2026)},
  pages =	{6:1--6:21},
  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.2026.6},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-281122},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2026.6},
  annote =	{Keywords: Fast state machine replication, consensus, partial synchrony, fault-tolerance}
}

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Optimality and Trade-Offs in Fast BFT SMR

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