Fast Tendermint: Speeding Up a Foundational Consensus Protocol

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.