Beluga: Block Synchronization for BFT Consensus Protocols

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15517v1
• Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2025 15:12:16 GMT
• Title: Beluga: Block Synchronization for BFT Consensus Protocols
• Authors: Tasos Kichidis, Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias, Arun Koshy, Ilya Sergey, Alberto Sonnino, Mingwei Tian, Jianting Zhang,
• Abstract summary: We introduce the concept of a block synchronizer, a simple abstraction that drives incremental block retrieval and enforces resource-aware exchange.<n>Beluga is a modular and scarcity-aware instantiation of the block synchronizer.<n>It achieves optimal common-case latency while bounding the cost of recovery under faults and adversarial behavior.
• Score: 7.734856966655481
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Modern high-throughput BFT consensus protocols use streamlined push-pull mechanisms to disseminate blocks and keep happy-path performance optimal. Yet state-of-the-art designs lack a principled and efficient way to exchange blocks, which leaves them open to targeted attacks and performance collapse under network asynchrony. This work introduces the concept of a block synchronizer, a simple abstraction that drives incremental block retrieval and enforces resource-aware exchange. Its interface and role fit cleanly inside a modern BFT consensus stack. We also uncover a new attack, where an adversary steers honest validators into redundant, uncoordinated pulls that exhaust bandwidth and stall progress. Beluga is a modular and scarcity-aware instantiation of the block synchronizer. It achieves optimal common-case latency while bounding the cost of recovery under faults and adversarial behavior. We integrate Beluga into Mysticeti, the consensus core of the Sui blockchain, and show on a geo-distributed AWS deployment that Beluga sustains optimal performance in the optimistic path and, under attack, delivers up to 3x higher throughput and 25x lower latency than prior designs. The Sui blockchain adopted Beluga in production.

Related papers

• Advancing Block Diffusion Language Models for Test-Time Scaling [73.54022593833638]
  We propose a unified framework for test-time scaling in BDLMs.<n>We introduce adaptivity in both decoding and block-wise generation.<n>We show that applying BACD and TCCF to TDAR-8B yields significant improvements over strong baselines.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-10T09:05:07Z)
• Proof of Trusted Execution: A Consensus Paradigm for Deterministic Blockchain Finality [0.391985484065646]
  We propose Proof of Trusted Execution (PoTE), a consensus paradigm where agreement emerges from verifiable execution rather than replicated re-execution.<n>Because the execution is deterministic and the proposer is uniquely derived from public randomness, PoTE avoids forks, eliminates slot.time bottlenecks, and commits blocks in a single round of verification.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-12-10T08:04:38Z)
• BlueBottle: Fast and Robust Blockchains through Subsystem Specialization [5.4507160079308425]
  We present BlueBottle, a two-layer consensus architecture.<n>The core layer, BB-Core, trades some fault tolerance for a much lower finality latency with a medium-sized core validator set.<n>The guard layer, BB-Guard, provides decentralized misbehavior detection in BB-Core, and a synchronous recovery path.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-11-19T11:42:43Z)
• BlockFFN: Towards End-Side Acceleration-Friendly Mixture-of-Experts with Chunk-Level Activation Sparsity [66.94629945519125]
  We introduce a novel MoE architecture, BlockFFN, as well as its efficient training and deployment techniques.<n>Specifically, we use a router integrating ReLU activation and RMSNorm for differentiable and flexible routing.<n>Next, to promote both token-level sparsity (TLS) and chunk-level sparsity ( CLS), CLS-aware training objectives are designed, making BlockFFN more acceleration-friendly.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-07-11T17:28:56Z)
• Zaptos: Towards Optimal Blockchain Latency [52.30047458198369]
  We introduce Zaptos, a parallel pipelined architecture designed to minimize end-to-end latency.<n>Zaptos achieves a throughput of 20,000 transactions per second with sub-second latency.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-01-18T00:22:22Z)
• Validated Strong Consensus Protocol for Asynchronous Vote-based Blockchains [4.79997217554732]
  Vote-based blockchains use Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus protocols to transition from one state to another.<n>This paper proposes a emphvalidated strong BFT consensus model that allows leader-based coordination in asynchronous settings.<n>Our protocol greatly reduces message complexity and is the first one to achieve linear view changes without relying on threshold signatures.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-09-12T15:54:40Z)
• The Latency Price of Threshold Cryptosystem in Blockchains [52.359230560289745]
  We study the interplay between threshold cryptography and a class of blockchains that use Byzantine-fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols.<n>Our measurements from the Aptos mainnet show that the optimistic approach reduces latency overhead by 71%.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-16T20:53:04Z)
• Enhancing Trust and Privacy in Distributed Networks: A Comprehensive Survey on Blockchain-based Federated Learning [51.13534069758711]
  Decentralized approaches like blockchain offer a compelling solution by implementing a consensus mechanism among multiple entities. Federated Learning (FL) enables participants to collaboratively train models while safeguarding data privacy. This paper investigates the synergy between blockchain's security features and FL's privacy-preserving model training capabilities.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-03-28T07:08:26Z)
• Graph Attention Network-based Block Propagation with Optimal AoI and Reputation in Web 3.0 [59.94605620983965]
  We design a Graph Attention Network (GAT)-based reliable block propagation optimization framework for blockchain-enabled Web 3.0. To achieve the reliability of block propagation, we introduce a reputation mechanism based on the subjective logic model. Considering that the GAT possesses the excellent ability to process graph-structured data, we utilize the GAT with reinforcement learning to obtain the optimal block propagation trajectory.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-03-20T01:58:38Z)
• Parallel Proof-of-Work with DAG-Style Voting and Targeted Reward Discounting [0.0]
  We present parallel proof-of-work with DAG-style voting, a novel proof-of-work cryptocurrency protocol. It provides better consistency guarantees, higher transaction throughput, lower transaction confirmation latency, and higher resilience against incentive attacks. An interesting by-product of our analysis is that parallel proof-of-work without reward discounting is less resilient to incentive attacks than Bitcoin in some realistic network scenarios.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-12-05T20:14:33Z)
• Nakamoto Consensus under Bounded Processing Capacity [9.167033097979116]
  We show that, in contrast to the classic bounded-delay model, Nakamoto's private attack is no longer the worst attack. We present a variant of PoS NC we call Blanking NC (BlaNC), which achieves the same resilience as PoW NC.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-03-16T07:00:34Z)
• Albatross: An optimistic consensus algorithm [1.1775652117617563]
  We introduce Albatross, a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain consensus algorithm that aims to combine the best of both worlds. At its heart, Albatross is a high-performing, speculative BFT algorithm that offers strong probabilistic finality. We prove our protocol to be secure under standard BFT assumptions and analyze its performance both on a theoretical and practical level.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2019-03-04T23:39:48Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.