Themis: Fast, Strong Order-Fairness in Byzantine Consensus

We introduce Themis, a scheme for introducing fair ordering of transactions into (permissioned) Byzantine consensus protocols with at most ƒ faulty nodes among n ≥ 4ƒ + 1. Themis enforces the strongest notion of fair ordering proposed to date. It also achieves standard liveness, rather than the weaker notion of previous work with the same fair ordering property.