Flexible Advancement in Asynchronous BFT Consensus

Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols are becoming an appealing solution to blockchains. As most blockchain systems are deployed on Wide Area Networks (WANs), with each node acting on behalf of its entity, partially synchronous BFT protocols that rely on network synchrony to elect a single leader can be ill-suited. In contrast, asynchronous protocols have no such timing assumptions. Existing asynchronous protocols confront challenges in terms of both flexibility and performance.