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Documents authored by Lewis-Pye, Andrew

Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2025.35
Morpheus Consensus: Excelling on Trails and Autobahns

Authors: Andrew Lewis-Pye and Ehud Shapiro

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 361, 29th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2025)

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

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)

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@InProceedings{lewispye_et_al:LIPIcs.OPODIS.2025.35,
  author =	{Lewis-Pye, Andrew and Shapiro, Ehud},
  title =	{{Morpheus Consensus: Excelling on Trails and Autobahns}},
  booktitle =	{29th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2025)},
  pages =	{35:1--35:20},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-409-3},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{361},
  editor =	{Arusoaie, Andrei and Onica, Emanuel and Spear, Michael and Tucci-Piergiovanni, Sara},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2025.35},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-252086},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2025.35},
  annote =	{Keywords: Distributed computing, consensus, quiescence}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.15
Beyond Optimal Fault-Tolerance

Authors: Andrew Lewis-Pye and Tim Roughgarden

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 354, 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)

Abstract
One of the most basic properties of a consensus protocol is its fault-tolerance - the maximum fraction of faulty participants that the protocol can tolerate without losing fundamental guarantees such as safety and liveness. Because of its importance, the optimal fault-tolerance achievable by any protocol has been characterized in a wide range of settings. For example, for state machine replication (SMR) protocols operating in the partially synchronous setting, it is possible to simultaneously guarantee consistency against α-bounded adversaries (i.e., adversaries that control less than an α fraction of the participants) and liveness against β-bounded adversaries if and only if α + 2β ≤ 1. This paper characterizes to what extent "better-than-optimal" fault-tolerance guarantees are possible for SMR protocols when the standard consistency requirement is relaxed to allow a bounded number r of consistency violations, each potentially leading to the rollback of recently finalized transactions. We prove that bounded rollback is impossible without additional timing assumptions and investigate protocols that tolerate and recover from consistency violations whenever message delays around the time of an attack are bounded by a parameter Δ^* (which may be arbitrarily larger than the parameter Δ that bounds post-GST message delays in the partially synchronous model). Here, a protocol’s fault-tolerance can be a non-constant function of r, and we prove, for each r, matching upper and lower bounds on the optimal "recoverable fault-tolerance" achievable by any SMR protocol. For example, for protocols that guarantee liveness against 1/3-bounded adversaries in the partially synchronous setting, a 5/9-bounded adversary can always cause one consistency violation but not two, and a 2/3-bounded adversary can always cause two consistency violations but not three. Our positive results are achieved through a generic "recovery procedure" that can be grafted on to any accountable SMR protocol and restores consistency following a violation while rolling back only transactions that were finalized in the previous 2Δ^* timesteps.
Cite as

Andrew Lewis-Pye and Tim Roughgarden. Beyond Optimal Fault-Tolerance. In 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 354, pp. 15:1-15:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{lewispye_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2025.15,
  author =	{Lewis-Pye, Andrew and Roughgarden, Tim},
  title =	{{Beyond Optimal Fault-Tolerance}},
  booktitle =	{7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)},
  pages =	{15:1--15:23},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-400-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{354},
  editor =	{Avarikioti, Zeta and Christin, Nicolas},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.15},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-247341},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.15},
  annote =	{Keywords: Distributed computing, consensus, recovery}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.18
From Permissioned to Proof-of-Stake Consensus

Authors: Jovan Komatovic, Andrew Lewis-Pye, Joachim Neu, Tim Roughgarden, and Ertem Nusret Tas

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 354, 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)

Abstract
This paper presents the first generic compiler that transforms any permissioned consensus protocol into a proof-of-stake permissionless consensus protocol. For each of the following properties, if the initial permissioned protocol satisfies that property in the partially synchronous setting, the consequent proof-of-stake protocol also satisfies that property in the partially synchronous and quasi-permissionless setting (with the same fault-tolerance): consistency; liveness; optimistic responsiveness; every composable log-specific property; and message complexity of a given order. Moreover, our transformation ensures that the output protocol satisfies accountability (identifying culprits in the event of a consistency violation), whether or not the original permissioned protocol satisfied it.
Cite as

Jovan Komatovic, Andrew Lewis-Pye, Joachim Neu, Tim Roughgarden, and Ertem Nusret Tas. From Permissioned to Proof-of-Stake Consensus. In 7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 354, pp. 18:1-18:26, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{komatovic_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2025.18,
  author =	{Komatovic, Jovan and Lewis-Pye, Andrew and Neu, Joachim and Roughgarden, Tim and Tas, Ertem Nusret},
  title =	{{From Permissioned to Proof-of-Stake Consensus}},
  booktitle =	{7th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2025)},
  pages =	{18:1--18:26},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-400-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{354},
  editor =	{Avarikioti, Zeta and Christin, Nicolas},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.18},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-247373},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2025.18},
  annote =	{Keywords: Permissioned Consensus, Proof-of-Stake, generic Compiler, Blockchain}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2023.14
Fever: Optimal Responsive View Synchronisation

Authors: Andrew Lewis-Pye and Ittai Abraham

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 286, 27th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2023)

Abstract
View synchronisation is an important component of many modern Byzantine Fault Tolerant State Machine Replication (SMR) systems in the partial synchrony model. Roughly, the efficiency of view synchronisation is measured as the word complexity and latency required for moving from being synchronised in a view of one correct leader to being synchronised in the view of the next correct leader. The efficiency of view synchronisation has emerged as a major bottleneck in the efficiency of SMR systems as a whole. A key question remained open: Do there exist view synchronisation protocols with asymptotically optimal quadratic worst-case word complexity that also obtain linear complexity and responsiveness when moving between consecutive correct leaders? We answer this question affirmatively with a new view synchronisation protocol for partial synchrony assuming partial initial clock synchronisation, called Fever. If n is the number of processors and t is the largest integer < n/3, then Fever has resilience t, and in all executions with at most 0 ≤ f ≤ t Byzantine parties and network delays of at most δ ≤ Δ after GST (where f and δ are unknown), Fever has worst-case word complexity O(fn+n) and worst-case latency O(Δ f + δ).
Cite as

Andrew Lewis-Pye and Ittai Abraham. Fever: Optimal Responsive View Synchronisation. In 27th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 286, pp. 14:1-14:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)

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@InProceedings{lewispye_et_al:LIPIcs.OPODIS.2023.14,
  author =	{Lewis-Pye, Andrew and Abraham, Ittai},
  title =	{{Fever: Optimal Responsive View Synchronisation}},
  booktitle =	{27th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2023)},
  pages =	{14:1--14:16},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-308-9},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2024},
  volume =	{286},
  editor =	{Bessani, Alysson and D\'{e}fago, Xavier and Nakamura, Junya and Wada, Koichi and Yamauchi, Yukiko},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2023.14},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-195041},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2023.14},
  annote =	{Keywords: Distributed Systems, State Machine Replication}
}
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