Online Payments by Merely Broadcasting Messages
We address the problem of online payments, where users can transfer funds among themselves. We introduce Astro, a system solving this problem efficiently in a decentralized, deterministic, and completely asynchronous manner. Astro builds on the insight that consensus is unnecessary to prevent double-spending. Instead of consensus, Astro relies on a weaker primitive - Byzantine reliable broadcast - enabling a simpler and more efficient implementation than consensus-based payment systems.In terms of efficiency, Astro executes a payment by merely broadcasting a message. The distinguishing feature of Astro is that it can maintain performance robustly, i.e., remain unaffected by a fraction of replicas being compromised or slowed down by an adversary. Our experiments on a public cloud network show that Astro can achieve near-linear scalability in a sharded setup, going from 10K payments/sec (2 shards) to 20K payments/sec (4 shards). In a nutshell, Astro can match VISA-level average payment throughput, and achieves a 5×improvement over a state-of-the-art consensus-based solution,while exhibiting sub-second 95th percentile latency.
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Collins, D. P., Guerraoui, R., Komatovic, J., Monti, M., Xygkis, A., Pavlovic, M., Kuznetsov, P., Pignolet, Y.-A., Seredinschi, D.-A., & Tonkikh, A. (2020). Online Payments by Merely Broadcasting Messages. 2020 50th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks Workshops (DSN-W). 50th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), Valencia, Spain. https://doi.org/10.1109/DSN48063.2020.00023
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