A Brief Intro to Lachesis Consensus Engine

What is Lachesis?

Lachesis protocol uses a DAG-based asynchronous non-deterministic algorithm to achieve practical Byzantine fault tolerance (pBFT).

As presented in our ONLAY paper, we introduced graph layering and root graphs for faster root selection in the Lachesis consensus protocol. With the assigned layers on the evolutionary DAGs across the nodes, the protocol achieves deterministic topological ordering of finalized event blocks in an asynchronous leaderless system.

StakeDag is our recent innovation that leverages participants’ stake as validating power to achieve practical BFT in a leaderless asynchronous system.

StakeDag protocol extends our Lachesis protocol to use layer assignment on the DAG to achieve quick consensus with a more reliable ordering of final event blocks.

The benefits of StakeDag are two-fold:

1. StakeDag protocol is fair because every node has an equal chance to create a new event block.
2. It has fewer vulnerabilities than PoW, PoS, and dPoS.

Interested readers can find more details in our technical reports:

• StakeDag: Stake-based Consensus For Scalable Trustless Systems.
• ONLAY: Online Layering for scalable asynchronous BFT system.
• Fantom: A scalable framework for asynchronous distributed systems.

What is Fantom’s Opera mainnet?

Lachesis is the core engine running our Fantom’s Opera mainnet. Our mainnet allows users to deploy and use smart contracts that are compatible with Ethereum’s EVM.

What about the speed?

Node’s performance can depend on other factors, such as how fast EVM can execute the finalized transactions.

What if the execution time of transactions are excluded? In that case, one can measure the actual speed of the consensus engine.

Our experiments show that it can achieve up to 10k TPS (yes, 10k). It is achieved on separate AWS nodes running medium specs.

For more details, wait for the next posts!