Blockchain Epidemic Consensus for Large-Scale Networks

2025-08-04

AI Summary

Existing blockchain consensus protocols face fundamental trade-offs among scalability, resource overhead, and Byzantine fault tolerance. To address these limitations in large-scale networks, this paper proposes a role-free, epidemic-style consensus protocol. Inspired by epidemiological spreading models, the protocol eliminates reliance on centralized roles, achieves probabilistic convergence, enables efficient message dissemination, and exhibits strong tolerance to network delays. Unlike traditional protocols—including Paxos, Raft, PBFT—and recent metastable protocols such as Avalanche and Snowman, our design significantly improves throughput, reduces consensus latency, and enhances message efficiency. Experimental evaluation demonstrates sub-second end-to-end latency and throughput exceeding 10,000 TPS even at 1,000-node scale, while maintaining high robustness and low communication overhead. The protocol establishes a novel, scalable, lightweight, and Byzantine-fault-tolerant consensus paradigm for next-generation large-scale blockchain systems.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Scalability, Parallel & Distributed Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Machine Learning: Scalability of ML Systems

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrencies
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Decentralized Web and Fediverse systems

Abstract

Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that has applications in many domains such as cryptocurrency, smart contracts, supply chain management, and many others. Distributed consensus is a fundamental component of blockchain systems that enables secure, precise, and tamper-proof verification of data without relying on central authorities. Existing consensus protocols, nevertheless, suffer from drawbacks, some of which are related to scalability, resource consumption, and fault tolerance. We introduce Blockchain Epidemic Consensus Protocol (BECP), a novel fully decentralised consensus protocol for blockchain networks at a large scale. BECP follows epidemic communication principles, without fixed roles like validators or leaders, and achieves probabilistic convergence, efficient message dissemination, and tolerance to message delays. We provide an extensive experimental comparison of BECP against classic protocols like PAXOS, RAFT, and PBFT, and newer epidemic-based protocols like Avalanche and Snowman. The findings indicate that BECP provides desirable gains in throughput, consensus latency, and substantial message-passing efficiency compared to existing epidemic-based approaches, validating its usability as an effective and scalable approach for next-generation blockchain systems.

Problem

• Scalability issues in existing blockchain consensus protocols.
• High resource consumption in current consensus mechanisms.
• Limited fault tolerance in traditional blockchain networks.

Innovation

• Decentralized epidemic communication for consensus
• Probabilistic convergence without fixed validator roles
• Efficient message dissemination with delay tolerance