Alberto Sonnino
Mysten Labs & University College London
BFT Consensus: From Academic Paper to Mainnet
This talk shares our journey in bringing Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus from academic papers to operational blockchain networks. It begins in 2019 with our initial effort as researchers and engineers at Facebook to deploy the HotStuff consensus protocol at the heart of the Libra blockchain. We present how this journey led to modifications from the original theoretical design and the eventual migration to DAG-based systems, now implemented in the Sui blockchain and gaining traction across the blockchain space. We outline the numerous research and engineering challenges we faced at every step of this journey, describe how we addressed some of these challenges, and point out which ones remain open questions and require further research. The goal of this talk is to offer a different perspective on BFT consensus, focusing on the needs of real-world blockchains and offering insights that may not be visible from research papers alone.
About the speaker
Alberto Sonnino is a research scientist at Mysten Labs working on the Sui blockchain. I am also affiliated with the computer science department of University College London (UCL). His research interests are in distributed systems, blockchains, and privacy enhancing technologies. These days he mostly work on Byzantine fault tolerant systems for blockchain applications including consensus protocols, consensus-less (broadcast-based) algorithms, and distributed execution engines. He spend most of his time developing new algorithm to produce more performant distributed systems. A key aspect of his work is to leverage all the resources available to the machine and scale blockchain validators to run on multiple machines. The typical goal of his projects is to go beyond the research stage, I spend considerable effort to implement and evaluate systems to ultimately run them in production.