AionBFT: High-Throughput Asynchronous BFT Consensus with Even Faster Confirmation

• Research highlight 1 During the consensus phase, AionBFT can switch between a fast path and a fully asynchronous path based on network conditions. This effectively addresses the high confirmation latency observed when executing Dumbo-NG and other fully asynchronous consensus protocols under favorable network conditions, significantly reducing the protocol’s confirmation latency. This is because Dumbo-NG and other fully asynchronous consensus protocols operate in a purely asynchronous manner, even under good network conditions. • Research highlight 2 In AionBFT, the broadcast and consensus modules can operate in parallel, thus always fully utilizing bandwidth resources and addressing the issue of inferior bandwidth utilization of existing hybrid BFT protocols like BDT and Abraxas. • Research highlight 3 We demonstrate through experiments that AionBFT achieves superior overall performance compared to Dumbo-NG and BDT under both favorable and adverse network conditions, providing lower transaction confirmation latency without sacrificing throughput. Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus is essential for blockchain services under adversarial conditions. Deterministic BFT protocols achieve low latency in good networks but become vulnerable when the synchrony assumption fails. Fully asynchronous BFT protocols remove timing assumptions and improve robustness, yet incur high latency from randomization. Both of them face a trade-off between performance and robustness. Hybrid BFT protocols can achieve a better balance by incorporating an optimistic fast path. However, many hybrid protocols still couple dissemination with agreement, and the serial-path paradigm limit protocol performance. To address this issue, AionBFT decouples transaction dissemination from block agreement by running multicast and block consensus as parallel pipelines. Notably, it runs consensus on compact boundary vectors that summarise dissemination progress across n proposers, rather than on transaction batches. Moreover, AionBFT adopts a dual-mode consensus that switches between a fast deterministic path and a robust asynchronous path according to observed network conditions. Under this architecture, AionBFT further improves performance over serial hybrid protocols while retaining the robustness of asynchronous protocols. Experiments over diverse network conditions show that AionBFT reduces confirmation delay compared to Dumbo-NG and BDT, while maintaining comparable throughput in both favorable and adversarial settings.