Low-latency Blockchain Consensus

Abstract

Blockchains are increasingly attractive due to their decentralization, yet inherent limitations of high latency, in the order of minutes, and attacks on consensus cap their practicality. We introduce Blinkchain, a Byzantine consensus protocol that relies on sharding and locality-preserving techniques from distributed systems to provide a bound on consensus latency, proportional to the network delay between the buyer and the seller nodes. Blinkchain selects a random pool of validators, some of which are legitimate with high probability, even when an attacker focuses its forces to crowd out legitimate validators in a small vicinity.