Authored by:
Vincent Gramoli, University of Sydney
Rachid Guerraoui, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
Andrei Lebedev, University of Sydney
Gauthier Voron, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
Blockchains promise to make online services more fault tolerant because they are replicated on a distributed system of nodes. Their nodes typically run different implementations of the same protocol across different geo-distributed regions, making the protocol supposedly tolerant to various failures including isolated crashes, transient failures, network partition or attacks. Unfortunately, their fault tolerance has never been compared.
In this paper, we provide the first fault tolerance comparison of blockchain systems. To this end, we introduce a novel sensitivity metric, interesting in its own right, as the responsiveness difference between a baseline environment and an adversarial environment. We inject various failures in controlled deployments of five modern blockchain systems, namely Algorand, Aptos, Avalanche, Redbelly and Solana.
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This paper was co-authored by our CTO and Founder Professor Vincent Gramoli.
Professor Vincent Gramoli is a full professor at the University of Sydney. He is a researcher in the field of distributed systems and algorithms, with a focus on the design and analysis of distributed systems and algorithms for shared memory and data-centric systems, including distributed hash tables, distributed shared memory and transactional memory. He has published numerous papers in top-tier conferences and journals in the field and has received several awards for his research. He is also currently serving as the Head of Concurrent Systems Research Group at the University of Sydney.