Gosig: A scalable and high-performance byzantine consensus for consortium blockchains

Abstract

Existing Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) protocols face significant challenges in safety, scalability, throughput, and latency. We present a new BFT protocol, Gosig, for the consortium blockchains. Gosig guarantees safety even in asynchronous networks fully controlled by adversaries, by combining secret leader selection with multi-round voting. We co-design both the consensus protocol and the underlying gossip network to optimize performance. In particular, we adopt transmission pipelining to fully utilize the network bandwidth while use aggregated signature gossip to reduce the number of messages. These optimizations help Gosig to achieve unprecedented single-chain performance. On a public cloud testbed spanning multiple data centers consisting of 280 nodes across 14 cities on five continents, Gosig achieves over 15,000 transactions per second with 15.8-second confirmation time. When the system scales to 5,000 nodes, Gosig can still achieve 3,000 transactions per second with about 23.9-second confirmation time.