Fully Decentralised Consensus for Extreme-scale Blockchain

2025-08-04

AI Summary

Existing consensus protocols for ultra-large-scale blockchains suffer from weak fault tolerance, high resource overhead, and susceptibility to collusion. To address these challenges, this paper proposes BECP—a fully decentralized Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocol. BECP innovatively integrates epidemic-style message propagation with a probabilistic convergence algorithm, eliminating fixed validators and leaders to achieve leaderless, structure-free, and strongly fault-tolerant distributed consensus. It operates atop a decentralized network communication model, significantly reducing message complexity and communication overhead. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that BECP achieves a 1.196× improvement in throughput, a 4.775× reduction in consensus latency, and a substantial decrease in total message volume. Compared to state-of-the-art protocols—including Paxos, Raft, PBFT, and Avalanche—BECP delivers superior scalability, efficiency, and security guarantees.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Scalability, Parallel & Distributed Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Decentralized Web and Fediverse systems

Abstract

Blockchain is a decentralised, immutable ledger technology that has been widely adopted in many sectors for various applications such as cryptocurrencies, smart contracts and supply chain management. Distributed consensus is a fundamental component of blockchain, which is required to ensure trust, security, and integrity of the data stored and the transactions processed in the blockchain. Various consensus algorithms have been developed, each affected from certain issues such as node failures, high resource consumption, collusion, etc. This work introduces a fully decentralised consensus protocol, Blockchain Epidemic Consensus Protocol (BECP), suitable for very large and extreme-scale blockchain systems. The proposed approach leverages the benefits of epidemic protocols, such as no reliance on a fixed set of validators or leaders, probabilistic guarantees of convergence, efficient use of network resources, and tolerance to node and network failures. A comparative experimental analysis has been carried out with traditional protocols including PAXOS, RAFT, and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), as well as a relatively more recent protocol such as Avalanche, which is specifically designed for very large-scale systems. The results illustrate how BECP outperforms them in terms of throughput, scalability and consensus latency. BECP achieves an average of 1.196 times higher throughput in terms of consensus on items and 4.775 times better average consensus latency. Furthermore, BECP significantly reduces the number of messages compared to Avalanche. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of fully decentralised consensus for blockchain technology based on epidemic protocols.

Problem

• Develops a fully decentralized consensus protocol for extreme-scale blockchain systems
• Addresses issues like high resource consumption and node failures in existing algorithms
• Improves throughput, scalability, and latency compared to traditional protocols

Innovation

• Fully decentralized epidemic consensus protocol
• No reliance on fixed validators or leaders
• Higher throughput and lower latency