DABFT: A Novel Adaptive Byzantine Fault Tolerance Framework for High-Performance Blockchain Consensus

Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanisms are vital for ensuring reliability in permissioned blockchain networks. However, existing BFT implementations such as Quorum-based BFT (QBFT), Istanbul BFT (IBFT) 2.0, and CLIQUE within the Hyperledger Besu framework face significant challenges, including high resource consumption, limited throughput, and scalability bottlenecks, particularly under complex and high-volume smart contract workloads. In this paper, we propose Dynamic Adaptive Byzantine Fault Tolerance (DABFT), a novel consensus framework designed to address these limitations through Adaptive Quorum Selection (AQS) and Optimized Transaction Batching (OTB). We evaluate DABFT using Hyperledger Caliper, benchmarking its performance against established BFT protocols under diverse transaction loads and operational conditions. The results demonstrate that DABFT achieves up to 30% higher throughput, 25% lower latency, and a 15% reduction in resource usage compared to QBFT. These improvements highlight DABFT’s potential to significantly enhance the performance, scalability, and resource efficiency of enterprise-grade blockchain deployments.